


Death

by I_msorrymylove



Series: The Master's Sequence [1]
Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-19
Updated: 2018-11-19
Packaged: 2019-08-09 00:26:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 9
Words: 36,212
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16439684
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/I_msorrymylove/pseuds/I_msorrymylove
Summary: At the end of the universe, a mysterious elderly brother and his younger sister are awakened by the Doctor. Who has he awakened, and what is the connection between the two of them and the sister? First of the Master's Sequence. Eventual Doctor/OC in later books.





	1. Utopia Pt. 1: Tired

**Author's Note:**

> This is a copy of my book under the same name on fanfiction net.

**Hello and welcome to my new Doctor Who story! My name is I_msorrymylove and I’m a huge fan of Doctor Who. I have written another Doctor/OC story in the past, the Kayla Hark Series, which features my OC, Kayla Hark, please feel free to check it out!**

**As for this story, it will be updated every Sunday and is a Doctor/OC story. Dezi, who is a Time Lady, is in her eighth regeneration. I picture her to look a bit like Catherine Tate with red hair only older – so think Donna but old.**

**Unlike my previous Doctor Who story, I will be breaking the episodes up into three parts because Dezi isn’t very talkative. I will mainly focus on the parts where either Dezi or the Doctor are in a scene because I’m assuming everyone has at least seen the episodes and know what’s going on. If I don’t make something clear then please let me know and I’ll answer any questions!**

**Key:** _“Mental talking”_

**Disclaimer: I do not own anything in Doctor Who; that belongs to its rightful owners.**

**ending this insanely long author’s note, I finally start Death:**

* * *

At the very, very edge of the universe, an older woman with red hair was rubbing her temples in the vain hope that the stimulus would help the pounding in her head. Her eyes were closed to the room outside of her, allowing her to not see the too bright, acritical yellow light or the concerned blue and green alien watching her.

“Chan – are you alright -tho?” The alien asked gently.

The woman did not open her eyes, but she did move one hand to give her a gentle wave. “I’m fine,” she reassured. “Just a headache.”

“Chan – do you want me to tell the Professor – tho?”

This time, when the woman replied, her eyes did pop open even when her head pounded in protest. “No, no,” she bit out quickly. “The Professor will just needlessly worry.”

The alien, Chantho, just nodded. Despite her ability to speak the language all at the silo spoke, old texts had called it the ‘Queen’s English,’ Chantho had trouble picking up on inflections most would notice and call out, like speaking too quickly. Most would see that as a sign that something was amiss, that the speaker did _not_ want what the other person was suggesting. Usually that would make the other person _do_ what the person did not want to happen, but Chantho had never picked up on this.

So the alien just smiled and nodded. “Chan – of course – tho.”

The door to the lab slid open, the noise making the woman wince involuntarily. The Professor, an elderly man with gray hair and wrinkles, walked into the room with an air of weariness. “The Futurekind are becoming reckless,” he reported. “Two dead on a run for water. The other one only just made it out with his life.”

The woman frowned. “And the water?” she asked carefully. She had felt parched for the last few days as she tried to limit her intake of water and she had really been hoping for more to come soon. They only had three or four more cups left.

“Not worth death,” the Professor answered with a shrug. He frowned at the woman. “Have you drank any today?”

“No,” the woman said with a sigh.

Fixing her with a look, the Professor nodded to their small amount of water. “Drink,” he said in a clear order.”

“You’re older,” the woman pointed out, but she still got up from her seat and made her way over and drank a precious cup. She sighed gently, feeling the coolness of the water pool inside of her.

“Dezi you must take better care of yourself,” the Professor started. “What happens when I’m no longer here to remind you to drink and eat and sleep?”

“You’re my older brother Yana,” Dezi said with a shake of her head. “You’re always going to be with me.”

Professor Yana just shook his head. “That’s not the point. I’m worried about you. Don’t think I haven’t noticed your headaches.”

Dezi shook her head, the reminder making her head start to pound heavily. “It’s just old age.”

Yana caught her eye, forcing her to look up from the ground she had stared at when she had replied to him. “Dezi, what aren’t you telling me?”

“I’m telling you everything,” Dezi promised.

But that wasn’t the case at all. Even when talking to her brother, she could hear a younger male’s voice gleefully cry out, _“Cardiff.”_

* * *

“Cardiff?” Martha Jones, a black woman with dark hair pulled back into a pony tail, asked with a scoff. Martha had been traveling with the Doctor, a Time Lord, for a bit over a year now, and when compared to the alien planets and the past and the future…Cardiff was a bit of a let down.

Hearing the scoff in her voice, the Doctor threw down a lever and whirled on the floor to face her. “Ah, but the thing about Cardiff is that it's built on a rift in time and space-just like California and the San Andreas Fault. The rift bleeds energy. Every now and then I need to open up the engines, soak up the energy and use it as fuel.”

Despite the Doctor’s enthusiasm, Martha remained, very, very unimpressed. “So it's a pit stop.”

“Exactly,” the Doctor agreed, his voice far more excited.

Martha suddenly frowned and bit her lip, the memory of newspapers of a crack running through Cardiff running through her brain. “Wait a minute. They had an earthquake in Cardiff a couple years ago. Was that you?”

Having moved to work on the console itself, the Doctor did not look up at Martha. “Bit of trouble with the Slitheen,” he said dismissively. “Long time ago. Lifetimes. I was a different man back then.”

Martha frowned. She recognized the tone the Doctor was using, the all – too overpowering wistfulness. It was the same tone he used to talk about Rose. Martha had never met Rose, but by the way the Doctor talked about the woman she _had_ to have been something truly special. Someone who as capable of walking the Earth like a god.

Otherwise, why would the Doctor love Rose so much to the point where every single women around him was invisible?

She watched carefully as the Doctor stared off in space for a moment before he shook his head.  “Finito. All powered up,” he said, all enthusiastic once more.

Grabbing onto the monitor, the Time Lord pulled it to him and looked at it. Martha saw a hint of panic on his face before he quickly, far faster than he usually did, started to make the TARDIS leave. Suddenly, there was a hefty shake. Sparks flew off the console and the Doctor and Martha were sent to the floor with ‘huffs.’

Crawling forwards, Martha clutched onto the console and looked over to see the Doctor doing the same. “What's that?” she yelled to him. While the Doctor was _not_ the best driver, this was much worse than his usual craziness.

The Doctor was reading the monitor, his eyes scanning quickly over the intrarectally drawn circles. “We're accelerating into the future! The year one billion. Five billion. Five trillion. 50 trillion. What? The year 100 trillion. That's impossible!”

“Why? What happens then?” Martha asked.

“We're going to the end of the universe,” the Doctor answered with a flabbergasted face.

* * *

Yana had somehow bought Dezi’s answer that nothing was going on that she wasn’t telling him, which was very surprising. Dezi was a horrible liar, not because she couldn’t say the lie convincingly, but because her face would give away her guilt every single time.

But there was something in her gut that was telling her to _not_ tell Yana about the voice in her head. It wasn’t like she heard it every single day, far from it. It would go in a cycle, starting with a small headache that grew and grew and grew until Dezi was in near tears. Then man’s voice would say a couple of sentences, mainly about different locations or a person or a year. Like her head was a balloon, the headache would disappear and Dezi would feel fine…until the next headache started. The cycle usually lasted around a week or two at most.

Yet something was making Dezi nervous. She jumped when the scanner went off, reporting a high level of movement on the surface. Yana just turned to the screen and clicked his tongue. “There’s movement on the surface. Another human hunt. God help him,” he sighed with a shake of his head.

“Chan--should I alert the guards--tho?” Chantho asked with a small frown.

“I don’t think we can spare them,” Dezi said in a soft voice, a similar frown on her own face. The Futurekind had been hunting more often recently, as if they were preparing to go into hibernation. While their name was a myth about them, it was widely believed the Futurekind were just wild animals. Hibernation, from the little texts Dezi had read about animals, fit the bill.

But, Dezi wondered, just what kind of weather were the Futurekind hibernating from? The books had always spoken of snow, whatever that was, and cold blasting winds, yet that was the weather all the time – at least, that was case ever since the stars had gone out.

“One more lost soul dreaming of Utopia,” Yana said bitterly, his eyes still on the scanner as the hunt played out overhead.

Dezi got up from her seat and moved over to her older brother. Wordlessly, she placed a hand on his shoulder, trying to give him as much comfort as she could. He sighed and rested his cheek against it for only a few moments, relaxing just a tiny bit at the gesture.

“Don’t give up Yana,” Dezi said softly, the order coming out as a gentle request. “Utopia will work; we just need more time.”

“Time is what we don’t have,” Yana pointed out with a shake of his head. “Time is what _I_ don’t have, not in my old state.”

Dezi sighed and walked over to the coffee, pouring a cup for the two of them. “We have enough time for a coffee break,” she said firmly. “Lt. Atillo will understand.”

Grimacing at the name, Yana moved away from the machine to sit down with Dezi at a small circular table. Taking the offered cup, he took a sip and screwed his face up, his eyes watering. “Perhaps Utopia will have coffee that’s a little less sour.”

Shaking his head as if that would get rid of the taste lingering on his mouth, Yana looked over at Chantho was standing to the side. “Would you like to join us?” he offered.

“Chan—I am happy drinking my own internal milk—tho,” Chantho said with a happy smile.

While Dezi made the upmost effort to not laughing at Chantho, Yana visibly blanched. “Yes, well, that’s quite enough information, thank you,” he said curtly, earning him a hit on the arm from Dezi.

“Be nice,” she chastised.

For a moment all was peaceful in the lab, but then the tannoy _had_ to crackle and Lt. Atillo _had_ to say over it, “Professor and Dezi, I don’t mean to rush you two, but how are we doing?”

Yana jumped to his feet, his coffee sloshing onto the table. “Uh, yes…uh…uh, yes. Working. Yes. Almost there,” he rushed to reply, looking frantically over at Dezi and Chantho for aid.

“How’s it looking on the footprint?” Lt. Atillo prompted slowly, clearly not buying Yana’s answer.

“Chantho and I were able to accelerate the calculation matrix, but it’s going to take time,” Dezi answered. “It has to harmonize, but we’re trying to a new reversal process and we’ll have a definite result in two hours.”

As Lt. Atillo replied with a promise to check in once the two hours had passed, Dezi turned to look at her brother, expecting him to be next to her in mutual weariness. Instead, Yana had wandered to the side and was pressing his hands against his forehead, rubbing it in a circle-pattern.

Seeing Chantho looking at him as well, Dezi pointed her to the scanner while she went over to him, placing a hand on his arm.

“Yana,” she said softly. “Do you need some water.”

It was as if he had heard her minutes behind, because he only replied a minute or two after Dezi had spoken to him. “I’ll be fine. Just working.”

Dezi nodded understandably. “I told you it was part of getting old,” she teased.

Yana gave her a smile. “What would I do without you?” He wondered as he made his way over to the scanner.

“Not have sour coffee,” Dezi pointed out.

Sticking his tongue out at the remembered taste, Yana looked down at the scanner and then frowned. “Well, that’s not a standard reading.”

Dezi hurried over, something in Yana’s voice prompting her look. Usually, the humans and the Futurekind showed up as green dots, but this reading was a green _square;_ a green square that was phasing in and then off the screen before it settled.

“It would seem something new has arrived.”

Dezi suddenly lifted her hand to her forehead, wincing at the sudden voice saying _“Well, we’ve landed…I don’t know…Not even the Time Lords came this far.”_

Closing her eyes, Dezi looked over at the scanner in sudden alarm. It had to be a coincidence that this voice had just landed somewhere when the scanner picked up on something appearing and disappearing…or landing.

And who were the Time Lords? The more Dezi pondered on the name, the more she was certain she had heard the name before. It felt familiar, like the old coat she had gotten at their last refugee camp. She pondered the name so much, she didn’t even notice the way it seemed to echo in her brain, shifting from the man’s voice to her own…only this voice was far lighter and almost amused than her current voice.

* * *

The Doctor frowned down at Jack Harkness, a man who should _not_ be lying in front of him clearly dead.  It was impossible and it went against the laws a time, the itching he felt around the man just proved it. “Hello again,” he greeted the man’s corpse, wincing as he took in the burns the man would have felt. The time winds were unforgiving and harsh. If Jack hadn’t been, well, Jack, then the man would have been in utter agony. He actually looked peaceful, though the paleness setting in would throw most people from ‘peaceful’ to ‘dead.’

The Doctor reached behind his neck and scratched it, wincing at the awkward silence he was sharing with Jack’s corpse. “Oh, I’m sorry,” he said in a tone just a tad too grudging to actually _mean_ the apology. Jack had been an adult and he had made his decision with all the information available. It wasn’t the _Doctor’s_ fault that Rose had brought him back to life.

Though the whole ‘leaving on a space station’ probably did deserve some sort of note, maybe even a box of chocolates.

Martha flew back out of the TARDIS, an unnecessary medical kit in hand. Ever the nurse, the Doctor knew nothing would persuade Martha from trying to help Jack, and the Doctor liked that; it was one of the reasons she was his companion. She was compassionate about everyone, including strangers lying outside the TARDIS doors at the end of the known universe.

And it was the end of the universe. The lack of stars in the sky just proved what the Doctor had already known – he was the first Time Lord to come this far in the history of the Time Lord race.

“It’s a bit odd, though,” Martha informed the Doctor, staring down at Jack with frown. “Not very 100 trillion—that coat’s more like World War II.”

The Doctor nodded slowly, taking in Jack’s attire for the first time. The man was wearing a long WWII style coat with the same era’s shirt, slacks, and suspenders underneath it. Of course that had to be a nod to himself, the Doctor realized; they had first met in WWII.

Remembering that Martha expected an answer, the Doctor slowly informed her of his theory: “I think he came with us.”

Martha didn’t turn to display her shock, but the Doctor knew her mouth had likely dropped open, and he could see her hands shaking as she set up the medical equipment. “How d’you mean? From Earth?” She asked in a voice that was _trying_ to be casual but failing. Horribly.

“Must’ve been clinging to the outside of the TARDIS all the way through the vortex. Well, that very him,” he muttered the last part with a shake of his head. Even when Jack had relaxed while traveling with Rose and his old self, he still would jump to do anything dangerous, even if it meant his life was at risk – especially if his life was at risk, in some cases. Sometimes, the Doctor wondered if Jack wanted to die.

Despite how stupid Time Agents were, even they knew that going into the time vortex was suicide, and there’s no _near_ about it.

Martha turned to face the Doctor, an odd expression on her face. It was part serious, part incredulous; she clearly could not tell if the Doctor was being fully serious. “What? Do you know him?” She asked in a skeptic voice, her eyebrow arching.

“Friend of mine. Used to travel with me. Back in the old days,” the Doctor explained, his hand going to the back of his head and scratching at it as he spoke, not truly aware of the action.

“But he’s—I’m sorry, there’s no heartbeat. There’s nothing. He’s dead,” Martha said slowly, her eyes meeting him as she scanned his face to watch him carefully.

But the Doctor was not upset, no where close to crying or any mournful actions. He just took a step back and crossed his arms, feeling an uncomfortable pull in his stomach that had not been there earlier. He looked down at Jack and watched as the man did not move…

Until he _did._ He jerked alive, reaching up to grab Martha’s shoulder with a loud and powerful gasp for breath followed by several rapid ones.

Like anyone who was grabbed suddenly by someone they fully believed to be dead, Martha shrieked.  But like anyone who was able to successfully travel with the Doctor, she took this new development in stride. “Oh well, so much for me,” she said with a shake of head, deciding firmly that Jack _could not_ have come back to life.

And then Martha went into doctor mode. She rubbed Jack’s back in a soothing circle, saying to him, “It’s all right. Just breathe deep. I’ve got you now.”

If the Doctor had any doubts who Jack was, they were erased by the familiar actions the man did. He looked Martha up and down and then gave her a smile with just a few too many white teeth in it to be anything but charming. “Captain Jack Harkness. And who are you?”

Martha flushed under the smile Jack was giving her. “Martha Jones.”

Jack held out a hand, the smile, somehow, growing wider. “Nice to meet you, Martha Jones.”

“Oh, don’t start!” the Doctor burst as Martha shook Jack’s hand.

Jack rolled his eyes, giving the Doctor a short look. “I was just saying hello,” he protested.

“I don’t mind,” Martha added quickly, as if _that_ made it any better. No one ever minded Jack’s flirting, but that still didn’t make it the most annoying thing to watch.

Getting to her feet, Martha helped Jack to stand. Jack gave her a charming smile…and then seemed to forget about her in favor of turning to take the Doctor in with a cold, guarded look. The Doctor gave him a cold, guarded look of his own, meeting Jack’s eyes with a clear challenge.

“Doctor,” Jack said.

“Captain,” the Doctor replied.

The Doctor couldn’t help but feel very pleased inside when Jack was the one to relax first by giving the Doctor a small nod. “Good to see you.”

“And you. Same as ever…although…have you had work done?” the Doctor asked, raising his chin to get a good look at Jack in the dim lighting.

Jack rolled his eyes. “You can talk!” He protested with a motion to the Doctor’s face.

The Doctor just shrugged. Regeneration was far different from getting cosmetic surgery – one was a necessary, the other was a vanity. “Oh yes, the face. Regeneration,” he explained. A paused, his brow furrowing. While he was used to changing his face, others, like Jack, would not be. “How did you know this was me?”

“The police box kinda gives it away,” Jack pointed out dryly. “I’ve been following you for a long time. You abandoned me.”

“Did I?” the Doctor questioned in a light tone – or at least his best impression of one. “Busy life. Move on,” he suggested.

Excepting that that would be the best response he would get from the Doctor, Jack switched topics. “Just gotta ask. The Battle of Canary Wharf. I saw the list of the dead. It said Rose Tyler.”

The Doctor beamed at the question, not noticing Martha’s stiffening behind the two men. “Oh no! Sorry! She’s alive!” he assured the man.

“You’re kidding?!” Jack cried out, staring at the Doctor with baited breath, as if the Doctor would be so cold as to _lie_ about Rose Tyler.

“Parallel world safe and sound. And Mickey! And her mother!”

“Oh yes!” With the whoop still ringing in the air, Jack pulled the Doctor into a tight hug, laughing so infectiously that the Doctor couldn’t help but join in.

Neither noticed Martha hanging back, a small frown on her face. She had never met Rose before, but the way the Doctor talked about her, and now the way Jack was reacting to her, Martha had a feeling that if she ever _did_ meet then she would be hopelessly disappointed. Rose-tinted glasses are very much of a thing.

But Martha had learned how to not look upset by the Doctor’s reaction. So she just smiled wryly and shook her head. “Gold old Rose,” she murmured.

* * *

Dezi was watching the scanner, though not out of interest. No, this was necessity akin to sleeping and eating. The more she watched the scanner and the three dots around the unknown square, the more Dezi was sure that one of those dots were _him._

This was only backed up by the increasing frequency she heard the man’s voice. The cycle of waves she had become used to, what she expected to happen each week, had vanished when the green square stopped blipping out on screen. In their place was frequent sharp stabs of pain in her head followed by snippets of what the man was saying.

As if this wasn’t enough, the green dots had now started to move, their trajectory taking them to the green dot being chased by the Futurekind. If the chased person was smart, then they were going to try and make it to the silo, and since the three new dots were going to meet up with this person, that meant they were coming to the silo. Which meant _he_ was coming to the silo.

Not for the first time, Dezi wondered what the man looked like. Even when she had thought him a disembodied voice, she had laid awake wondering what person would fit the voice. She had already decided that the voice’s body was a man, no women Dezi had met, humanoid or otherwise, could make their voice go that deep.

Besides that, though, Dezi had always liked to imagine him as tall. Not too tall, but not overtly short either. He would had brown hair that would stick up everywhere, especially when he ran his hand through it – which Dezi had decided he would do a lot. His eyes would be brown too, a warm, understanding brown.

Dezi had no idea where the idea for this man had come from; she had spent her life going from camp to camp with her brother and had never thought to make friends with some of the other children. Now she was old and the man she imagined to go with the voice was much younger than her.

“Dezi,” Yana called over to her. “I need you to go get some supplies.”

Biting her lip, Dezi gave the scanner one last look, the three dots had only _just_ met up with the other dot, and walked over to her brother. “Supplies?”

“Just some more gluten extract,” Yana elaborated with a frown. His eyes were firmly on the circuit in front of him, not even glancing up to look at his sister, which meant he did not see Dezi frown.

She was not frowning because she was being asked to go get supplies. Yana had asked that from her before and she was always more than willing to help. Unlike her older brother, or even Chantho, Dezi was not a technical genius. Sure, she could keep up with what Yana was trying to do, and she had been able to run a few diagnostic tests on the model for him, anyone could be trained to do that. If Dezi was anything, she was an assistant to her brother.

No, she was not frowning at the task itself, but of what the task asked of her. “That’s at the other end of the silo,” Dezi reminded her brother.

Yana just hummed. “As long as I get it in the next thirty minutes we should be fine,” he said in a reassuring manner, assuming that Dezi was worried about how long the task would take her.

But Dezi was not worried about the length of the task, just where it would take her – away from the scanner and the three new green dots and the strange green square. “Will you try to contact me if something happens with the scanner?” Dezi asked.

Yana waved his hand. “Yes, yes,” he agreed.

Knowing he had not heard a word she had said, Dezi huffed and headed out. If she walked very quickly, at a sped of short of a jog, really, then Dezi would be back within twenty minutes. If she actually did jog, then she would only take fifteen minutes.

Usually she wasn’t so invested in the scanner, but then again, usually she wasn’t hearing the man’s voice in her head so often. This day, if it was anything, was _not_ usual. Not even close to usual.

She winced, rubbing at her forehead with one hand as a sharp pain ran through her skull, making her teeth clench. _“I’ve got a ship nearby. It’s safe. It’s not far, it’s just over there…Or maybe not.”_

The voice just made her walk faster.

* * *

As Dezi walked through the entrance, the bags holding the gluten extract with one hand, she collided with a firm figure. She gasped out, nearly falling against the man’s chest only for the man to grab both her arms to steady her.

“Easy there,” he said in an odd voice. His vowels sounded different, as if he was spreading every word apart.

Dezi looked up, taking in the man’s face. He had blue eyes, brown hair, and a smile on his face. “You alright?” the man asked in the still odd voice.

“I’m fine,” Dezi assured him. She took a step back and stared at the man critically. “You’re voice is odd.”

The man laughed heartedly. “I like to think of it as exotic,” he suggested with a raised eyebrow and a smile shifting to a smirk.

Dezi shifted her weight, feeling a blush rising in her cheeks. While she had not been around many others except for her brother, she knew what flirting looked like and _this_ man was flirting. She did not like it. So she excused herself.

“I really must get going,” she told him. “My brother needs me to get these supplies back to him.”

Not giving him much time to protest, she started to head to the lab, her grip on the gluten bags tightening in relief when the man did not go after her. His flirting made her feel itchy and uncomfortably warm. The more space she put between him and herself, the better.

* * *

Just as she made it to the lab door, it slid open because Yana was leaving. “Dezi!” He cried out, his eyes glittering. “Just drop those off. Quickly now!”

Not questioning him, Dezi placed the bags just inside the door. “Is everything alright?” she asked, taking in his flushed appearance.

Yana nodded rapidly. “There’s a new person at the silo. They say he’s a scientist!”

He hurried off with the expectation for Dezi to follow him clear. Frowning, Dezi glanced back at the lab before she too followed. It couldn’t possibly be _him,_ could it? She desperately wanted to look at the scanner, to see if the three dots and the square had disappeared, but Yana’s clear want for her to follow was not to be ignored.

Even though she did next to nothing, Yana liked to have her meet everyone as an equal. He always explained it as they were family, and that’s what family does, but it always made Dezi feel awkward. She didn’t understand the questions poised at her about the technical side, and when Yana jumped in to answer every single question, she could see the skepticism in the people’s eyes.

But it made Yana so excited, and if this man was a scientist then maybe he would know what to do for the circuit and fix it. Maybe everyone would get to Utopia.

“Did they give a name?” Dezi asked.

“Just ‘doctor,’” Yana answered.

“Doctor of what?”

“Of everything.”

Dezi frowned. A ‘doctor of everything’ was a bold claim. Doctors had knowledge, had read ancient texts and could speak about the years past when the stars hadn’t gone out. Some claimed they could heal others and some claimed they knew the future. None, or at least none of the ones she had come upon, claimed they were a scientist. She hoped her brother had not jumped to conclusions only to be let down.

Yana paused in front of corridor, looking it down with an odd expression on his face. “Yana?” Dezi asked, placing a hand on his shoulder.

Yana turned suddenly, his face shifting to something like a snarl, his eyes wild. He grabbed her wrist and squeezed it tightly enough she gasped out. He said nothing, just glared at her with his wild, wild eyes, squeezing her wrist tighter and tighter…

“Yana, you’re hurting me,” Dezi panted out, tears welling in her eyes.

Immediately, Yana dropped her wrist and stepped away. He looked down at his hand, his expression unreadable. After a moment of silence he shook his head. “You startled me,” he accused lightly before he rushed down the corridor.

Dezi watched him, her other hand going to her wrist and rubbing it slowly. She bit her lip, watching as he pushed through others to get to a group of three. With some trepidation, Dezi followed him from a distance. She didn’t want to startle him again and make him lash out and grab something. The way he had squeezed her wrist, glaring at her…it was not something Dezi would push him to do again.

Yana stopped at the group, which Dezi could not see yet. He looked between two men before settling on one of them, only to get pointed to the one he had ignored. Yana grabbed the man’s hand and started to shake it and then using it as a leash to pull the man off down the back corridors that would take them to the labs quickly. The man called something of his shoulder before he was lead off.

Dezi hurried forwards, meeting the man’s two companions. She took them in. One was a black, dark haired woman with a thoughtful frown on her face and the other was…“Hello again.”

Flirting man gave her a wide smile, drawing the black woman to look at her. “Hello,” Dezi greeted, just to be polite.

The man stuck out his hand. “Captain Jack Harkness.”

Gingerly, as if it might lead to larger implications, Dezi shook the man’s hand. He was warm in a way that made her want to stand back. Quickly. She knew it was impolite when she moved her hand out of his, but she truly couldn’t help herself. Something about him made her want to move away.

But the black woman seemed pleasant. She introduced herself as “Martha Jones,” and shook Dezi’s hand. “Do you know that man?” she asked with a nod down the corridor Yana had taken the scientist down.

“That’s Professor Yana,” Dezi informed her. “He’s my brother.”

Martha nodded slowly, a frown on her face for a brief moment. “Where’d he take the Doctor?”

“Who?”

It was Jack who answered Dezi’s question. “The man your brother took off with. He’s the Doctor.”

Dezi felt a chill go up her spine. She was sure if she looked at her arms she would see that goose bumps had risen up on them, that her hair would be standing on end. Several times when she had heard the voice, he would introduce himself as ‘the Doctor.’ No other name would ever follow this introduction. Now, with Jack and Martha speaking about this man with only the name ‘Doctor,’ Dezi was certain.

Whoever this man was, Dezi knew it was the voice in her head. It was _him._


	2. Utopia Pt. 2: Waking Up

Dezi stood off to the side as Chantho greeted Jack and Martha. Yana was showing the ‘Doctor’ all he built enthusiastically, practically bouncing up and down as he motioned and spoke, yet Dezi was not staring at that. Instead, she was looking, a frown marring her face, at the ‘Doctor.’

It was not lost on her that he looked exactly how imagined; tall but not too tall, brown hair that stuck up when he a ran his hand through it, and warm brown eyes. If it had been any one else she would have pat herself on the back for guessing how he looked. But this was not anyone else. This was a man who she had thought to be a disembodied voice; she had only recently thought about him being an actual person. But the image she had conjured up predated thinking of him as an actual person.

She bit her lip, watching the man carefully. She had not spoke since had come in, part of her fearful – not that he had heard her voice, but that he hadn’t. If he had heard her voice then that would be understandable and could even be explained with a psychic connection. While they were rare, they were something that happened. If he hadn’t heard her voice…then what would that mean? The explanation of a psychic connection was already a stretch, people usually had to be close to form one, but a half psychic connection was not a thing.

The ‘Doctor’ looked up from what Yana was showing her, an annoyed expression on his face. Dezi felt herself flush, figuring she had been caught staring at him, but instead the man snapped at Jack, “Stop it.”

“Can’t I say hello to anyone?” He protested.

Curious about the source, Dezi looked over at him. He was standing just a small bit closer to Chantho than absolutely necessary, and Chantho herself was blushing a slight dark green. “Chan—I do not protest—tho,” she said in a softer voice than usual.

Shaking his head, the ‘Doctor’ looked back down. Dezi watched as Jack rolled his eyes. “Maybe later, Blue,” he said with a wink to Chantho. Turning his back on her, he walked over to the ‘Doctor.’

Dezi crossed her arms, not liking how everyone was moving away from where she was standing. It was look weird for her to be standing by herself against the wall, but she did not want to go near Jack or the ‘Doctor.’

But Yana made her decision for by calling “Dezi! Can you describe this to the…the Doctor?”

Feeling like she had no choice, Dezi walked over to the circuit and looked at it. “Wouldn’t you be better at explaining it?” She asked in a far softer voice than normal.

Yana shook his head, pulling her to his side with his arm around her shoulder. “Nonsense! You were the one that came up with the design.”

Dezi sighed. “It’s a stabilizer,” she started, her eyes meeting the man’s. He didn’t make a face or stare at her, which made Dezi pause before she continued with, “When we tried to send a practice rocket off, it wouldn’t go because it got overloaded. Chantho and I came up with the code infused into it, but my brother was the one who built it. He built everything here.”

The man raised an eyebrow. “That’s impressive,” he said, though it was unclear which of the siblings he was speaking to. He turned to Dezi with a frown. “What’s your name?” he asked.

“Dezi.”

An odd expression grew on the man’s face, but it was like a passing shadow because it vanished quickly. “Nice to meet you, I’m the Doctor.”

He held out his hand and Dezi gingerly took it, shaking it in introduction. While it was just a handshake, Dezi felt like it was the most important handshake she had ever had. And while she had only just met the Doctor, she wanted to squeezed down on the hand and use it pull her to him.

“Now Doctor,” Yana cut in. Turning to face him, the Doctor let go of Dezi’s hand, seeming to not feel the heady need to continue holding it that Dezi was, “The footprint for the rocket is not stable. If only we could harmonize the five impact patterns and unify them, well, we might yet make it. What do you think? Any ideas?”

The Doctor blinked his eyes flicking at the footprint and the rest of the models everywhere. His hand reached up and scratched the back of his neck. “Well, um, basically…sort of…not a clue,” he admitted slowly.

Dezi watched as her brother’s face dropped. “Nothing?” he asked in a hollow voice.

“I’m not from around these parts. I’ve never seen a system like it. Sorry.”

Reaching a hand out, Dezi placed it carefully on her brother’s arm, very aware of what had happened the last time she had touched her brother. This time, though, Yana was grateful for the gesture. His had covered Dezi’s as he spoke to the Doctor. “No, no. I’m sorry. It’s my fault. There’s been so little help.”

He slumped down into a chair ang gently moved Dezi’s hand off. After years and years of living with her brother, Dezi knew when he did not want to be around others, so she moved away from him. She glanced over at the Doctor to see him looking at the models, his brow furrowing. She thought about placing a hand on _his_ arm to lead him away, but she quickly dispelled the idea.

Instead, she walked back to the small sitting area and sat down at the table, waiting for Yana to call her over. She looked over at Martha, who was fiddling with a large drawstring pack, trying to get it open. While it was interesting, or at least amusing, to watch Martha’s attempts at opening the pack, Dezi couldn’t help but stare at the pack itself – whatever was inside was a large cylinder that bubbled and pulled at her gut the same way as when she had shaken the Doctor’s hand.

She almost got up to get whatever was inside out herself, but her own strong voice ordered her to _not_ do it. The Doctor had shown no signs of seeing her as anything other than Yana’s sister and something was telling her to make sure she kept it that way.

Still, her curiosity was growing by the minute. She felt her foot tap against the table she was sitting in front of, waiting for Martha to open the drawstring sack. Dezi nearly whooped for joy when Martha succeeded, but instead her mouth dropped open as the sack pulled away to reveal a human hand sitting in some sort of bubbling liquid.

“Oh my God,” Martha gasped loudly, drawing the others’ attention and their physical presence. Martha did not seem to care for anyone except Jack, who she turned to with her finger pointing at him. “You’ve got a hand. A hand in a jar. A hand in a jar in your bag.”

“That’s—that’s my hand!” The Doctor cried out, leaning forwards on the table to study the hand. He too looked at Jack, who defensively held up his hands.

“I said I had a Doctor detector,” Jack said in a way that sounded like a reminder.

Dezi frowned, looking at the Doctor’s _two_ hands on the table. “You have both hands,” she pointed out, earning herself a nod from the Doctor.

“Long story. I lost my hand Christmas Day. In a swordfight,” the Doctor explained, but that just made Dezi frown grow.

“What’s Christmas?” She asked, crossing her arms.

The Doctor looked over at Jack for help, but he just shrugged. Struggling for words, the Doctor started to scratch at the back of his neck. “Christmas is a day of celebration,” he said slowly and firmly.

Dezi nodded, looking at the hand in the jar. “Are there usually swordfights at Christmas?”

“No…this was something unusual,” the Doctor informed her. Next to him Jack snorted and shook his head, but didn’t comment any further.

Martha, however, was still focused on the third hand. She picked up the Doctor’s wrist and studied both hands, turning them over. “What? And you grew another hand?”

The Doctor moved his hands out of her grip to wave his fingers at her. “Um yeah. Yeah I did. Yeah. Hello.”

Finally, Yana decided to comment. Once Dezi had gotten her questions answered, she had turned her gaze to watch his face, seeing how his mind was racing at the sight of the hand and the knowledge that the Doctor had _regrown_ a limb. “Might I ask what species are you?”

The Doctor turned to Yana, an odd half-smile spreading across his face. “Time Lord. Last of. Heard of them?” He only got a blank face in return, making the Doctor turn to Dezi. “Legend or anything?” When Dezi slowly shook her head, he turned his gaze to Chantho. “Not even a myth?” Having gotten no recognition, the Doctor shook his own head. “Blimey, end of the universe is a bit humbling.”

“Do Time Lords do anything special?” Dezi asked. “Make psychic connections over long distances or something?”

The Doctor blinked at the question. “Time Lords are very special,” he said in a rather haughty tone. “I don’t know about the psychic connections over long distances though…” he voice trailed off and he started to look thoughtful, as if he was about to ask a question – likely why Dezi had asked her question.

Biting her lip, Dezi tried to come up with something to get his mind off of psychic connections. It had been stupid and far too risky to ask the Doctor in front of her brother. What if he found out now? After all, Yana was not stupid.

Not for the first time, Dezi was immensely thankful that Chantho sometimes had a hard time tracking conversations. “Chan—It is said that I am the last of my species too—tho,” she informed the Doctor. She was clearly unaware that she had stopped the Doctor from asking a question to Dezi, no, she was far too gullible to be trusted to keep a secret, which meant she had likely distracted Yana from Dezi’s question as well.

“Sorry, what was your name?” the Doctor asked, eyeing Chantho with a furrowed brown.

Blinking rapidly, Yana took a step next to Chantho. “My assistant and good friend, Chantho. A survivor of the Malmooth. This was their planet, Malcassairo, before we took refuge.”

The Doctor nodded slowly. “The city outside, that was yours?” he asked, his question clearly directed to Chantho.

“Chan—the conglomeration died—tho.”

Despite this sad news, the Doctor turned to Martha and Jack with a victorious look on his face. “Conglomeration! That’s what I said!” He said far too cheerfully to be polite.

“You’re supposed to say sorry,” Jack corrected with a shake of his head.

The Doctor blinked and then turned back to Chantho. “Oh, yes. Sorry,” he said, though he did not sound sorry at all.

But Chantho did not pick up on the insincerity. Inside she smiled at the kindness the Doctor’s words meant. “Chan—most grateful—tho.”

“You grew another hand?” Martha asked suddenly.

The Doctor turned to face her and wiggled his fingers once more. “Hello again. It’s fine. Look. Really, it’s me.” Holding out his hand, he shook Martha’s, making the girl giggle nervously.

“All this time and you’re still full of surprises,” she said lightly and with a shake of her head.

Clicking his tongue, the Doctor gave her a wink. Surprisingly to Dezi, Chantho commented on the Doctor’s strangeness. “Chan--you are most unusual—tho.”

“Well…” the Doctor trailed off meaningfully and then shook his head, leaving his thought hanging in the air.

Jack crossed his arms, the motion making Dezi look over at him. Feeling her gaze, he turned to her and asked, “So what about those things outside? The Beastie Boys. What are they?”

“They’re the Futurekind,” Dezi said with a shrug.

“Which is a myth in itself, but, uh, it is feared they are what we will become. Unless we reach Utopia,” Yana cut in, shaking his head at Dezi’s words. Ever since they had first heard the myth of the Futurekind Yana had always hated it. He claimed it was because it implied humans would live as some sort of savage animals until they died. Dezi, however, had always figured he hated the myth so because he feared it was right. The idea of becoming savage animals, of losing all his work…Dezi knew _that_ was his true fear. Not that he would become a Futurekind, but that his life’s work would be for nothing.

“And Utopia is…” the Doctor asked, unknowingly speaking exactly what Dezi was thinking about.

Yana’s mouth dropped and he turned to the Doctor, staring at him in shock. “Oh, every human knows of Utopia. Where have you been?”

“Bit of a hermit,” the Doctor excused with a shrug.

Dezi shook his head, disliking the lie she could hear from the Doctor. “You’re a hermit with friends?” she asked in a tone of voice a _hair_ not accusatory.

Still, the Doctor bristled at her question. “Hermits United. We meet up every ten years. Swap stories about caves. It’s good fun…for a hermit,” he said in a slightly snide voice. When Dezi had nodded at his words, he turned dismissively away from her and to Yana. “So, um, Utopia?”

Giving Dezi, not the Doctor, a slight frown, Yana led the Doctor to the computer with the navigation chart pulled up. Despite not being able to see it from her seat position, Dezi knew her brother was pointing at the red blinking dot on the screen.

“The call came from across the stars over and over again. Come to Utopia. Originated from that point,” Yana recited.

“Where is that?” the Doctor asked, leaning in to get a good look at the chart. He pulled a pair of glasses out of his pocket and put them on, his brow furrowing as he looked at the dot.

“Oh, it’s far beyond the Condensate Wilderness. Out towards the wildlands and the dark matter reefs. Calling us in. The last of the humans. Scattered across the night.”

Putting his glasses away, the Doctor turned to Yana. “What do you think’s out there?” he asked.

“I don’t know. A colony, a city, some sort of haven?” he speculated and then he shook his head. “The Science Foundation created the Utopia Project thousands of years ago to preserve mankind—to find a way of surviving beyond the collapse of reality itself. Now perhaps they found it. Perhaps not. But it’s worth a look, don’t you think?”

“Oh yes,” the Doctor agreed. “And the signal keeps modulating, so it’s not automatic. There’s a good sign. Someone’s out there. And that’s…ooh, that’s a navigation matrix, isn’t it? So you can fly without stars to guide you.”

While the Doctor paused, neither Dezi or Yana noticed. Dezi because she watching her brother’s face with growing concern. He had clearly started to space out the way they were both prone to doing. She got to her feet and walked over to his brother, ignoring the Doctor trying to speak to him.

“Yan?” she asked softly.

At her voice, Yana’s eyes met her. She could see the same wildness in them from before when he had grabbed her wrist and hurt her. Involuntarily, she stepped back from him, her hand going to the wrist he had injured before in a ghost of the pain. When Yana took a step towards her, however, it seemed to bring him back to the present. For he quickly shook his head and placed a hand on his temple, rubbing it in circles.

“I—Right, that’s enough talk. There’s work to do. Now if you could leave. Thank you,” he turned briskly and walked away, leaving a stunned Doctor to look at Dezi with a clear concern.

“Does he do that often?” he hissed. When Dezi did not reply, the Doctor huffed and walked after Yana. “Professor, there’s something we both know,” he said in a stern but soft voice. Yana stiffened but did not respond, spurring the man on. “That rocket’s not going to fly, is it? This footprint mechanism thing, it’s not working.”

Yana turned on his feet to stare at the Doctor, his eyes widening at what the man was saying. “We’ll find a way!” He promised, though it did not sound like he actually believed what he was saying.

“You’re stuck on this planet. And you haven’t told them, have you? That lot out there, they still think they’re gonna fly,” the Doctor continued, motioning to the door where all the refugees were.

“Isn’t it better to let them hope?” Dezi asked softly, her sudden addition to the conversation making the Doctor turn his head to glance at her.

She was surprised to see the Doctor smile at her words. “Quite right, too,” he agreed. He turned back to the Professor, and while Dezi could not see his face she knew he was smiling. “And I must say, Professor…” as he spoke he removed his coat and handed it off to Jack, who frowned down at it but didn’t protest. “Um, what was it?”

“Yana.”

“Professor Yana. This new science is well beyond me, but all the same, a boost reversal circuit, in any time frame, must be a circuit which reverses the boost. So, I wonder, what would happen if I did this?” Picking up the circuit casually, he used something Dezi could not see but could hear – it was a high-pitched noise whirling, as if it was a motorized machine.

Whatever the machine was, and whatever the Doctor had done to the circuit – worked! Dezi watched in utter amazement as the circuit powered up without sparks or fires.

“Chan—it’s working—tho!” Chantho gasped, her eyes glittering.

Yana shook his head, looking at the circuit and then at the man who had fixed it in utter amazement. “But how did you do that?”

The Doctor just grinned widely. “Oh, we’ve been chatting away. I forgot to tell you, I’m brilliant.”


	3. Utopia Pt. 3: Awake

The silo became frenzied when it was announced over the speakers that the rocket was going to fly; the refugees were going to Utopia. People were crying tears of joy as they packed the rolls of blankets and clothes they had held on for. Couples embraced, children were excitedly telling stories, and grandparents carried grandchildren too young to walk or understand the joy everyone was experiencing.

The lab, which had once been a quiet and somber place, was now full of life as Yana, Dezi, Jack, and the Doctor tried to make the rocket prepared in the shortest time they could. The guards had been pulled from the silo gates to help with the preparations, but that also made them relatively defenseless. While the gates remained closed, gates could be opened.

Martha and Chantho had offered to grab any extra supplies needed and had only been sent out a couple of minutes ago. Dezi had planned on joining them, figuring she would be of no help to her brother, but Yana had insisted she stay here, pointing out that they needed someone to work on the computers.

Her task really did not exist, or could easily have been done by Jack, but nevertheless she relented and stayed on a stool, keeping an eye on levels and occasionally making sure nothing got too hot by ordering the Doctor and Yana to move on from it.

The two men were now standing on opposite sides of a clear circuit board in the center of the lab – the very same circuit board Dezi had grabbed gluten extract for just earlier that day.

She heard a noise from the Doctor, sounding like a scoff. Frowning, she looked over to see him _sniffing_ the cord in his hands before he asked, “Is this..?”

“Yes, gluten extract. Binds the neutralino map together,” Yana explained with a nod.

Dezi watched as the Doctor stared at Yana, the cord still held loosely in his hand. He looked down at it and shook his head. “But that’s food. You’ve built this system out of food and string and staples. Professor Yana, you’re a genius.”

Yana scoffed to himself, an action that Dezi knew was coming the minute the Doctor had started to praise him. Her brother knew he was a genius, she could see it in is eyes every time he had to slow down to explain something to her – a frustration that _he_ understood it so why didn’t she? That look had been unbearable as he had gotten older and had talked to others, had seen that no one else seemed to think the same way as him. Now, as an old man, the look never showed up and any praise to him was met with scoffs – not a smile like he used to or even a nod.

“Says the man who made it work,” Yana pointed out.

The Doctor quickly shook his head. “Ooh…it’s easy coming in at the end but…you’re stellar. This is…this is magnificent. I don’t often say that ‘cause…well, ‘cause of me.”

“Well, even my title is an affectation. There hasn’t been such a thing as a university for over a thousand years. Dezi and I spent our lives going from one refugee ship to another,” Yana said somberly, a frown on his face reflecting back in the clear glass to where Dezi was sitting.

“He taught himself everything,” Dezi called over to the men. “He would read all these books and soon people started noticing him. We were sent here before most because they knew he was a genius and wanted him to work on the rocket.”

The Doctor nodded slowly while Yana remained frowning. “See? If you had been born in a different time, you’d be revered,” when Yana made of noise of clear protest, the Doctor pushed, “I mean it. Throughout the galaxies.”

“Oh, those damned galaxies. They had to go and collapse,” Yana said with a shake of his head. He sighed heavily, looking down from the circuit. “Some admiration would have been nice. Just a little. Just once.”

Dezi frowned, eyeing her brother from her seat. Surely her brother hadn’t forgotten the praise that had been lauded over him; the praise that had landed them in the silo months before others. She could see the Doctor frowning as well, his brow furrowing as he too saw the lie in what her brother had said.

But then the Doctor looked at the circuit and he nodded slowly, knowingly. “You can’t activate it from onboard. It’s gotta be from here. You’re staying behind,” he said in a low voice. “No praise as a child for your brains can match praise for a sacrifice.”

Yana didn’t reply for a long moment, making the silence stretch between him and the Doctor until it was so thick that Dezi felt like she was choking. “With Dezi and Chantho,” he informed in a soft voice. “They won’t leave without me. Simply refuses.”

She felt the Doctor’s eyes on her and she did not shy away from them. She held their gaze proudly, her head tilted as he studied her. “Yana and I are old,” she said. “This new world will have no place for us. We told Chantho she should go but she claimed she did not want to knowing we were dying without her.”

The Doctor stared at the siblings, an odd look on his face. “You would give your life so they could fly.”

“It’s time we’ve slept,” Dezi said, the double meaning on her final word clear for all in the room.

A peaceful silence fell over the lab as the two men worked, Dezi kept an eye on levels, and Jack was working on some monitors. It came as quite a shock, making Dezi literally jump in her seat, when the tannoy went off and Lt. Atillo’s voice, rushed but cheerful, came out of it. _“Professor, tell the Doctor we’ve found his blue box.”_

“Ah!” the Doctor cried out at the news.

Dezi frowned as she remembered the green square on the monitor before the Doctor arrived; surely, they had to be connected. Not for the first time did Dezi wonder just how much the Doctor was telling him about himself. All they knew was that he was a Time Lord and a hermit with friends, though the hermit part might have been something he had said defensively when pushed by Dezi.

“Doctor,” Jack called over, his voice not rising to a yell but still commanding.

The Doctor hurried over to Jack side and, after some trepidation because something made her not like Jack, Dezi followed him. She looked over the Doctor’s shoulder on the very opposite side of Jack to see a blue box with the words ‘police call box’ engraved on it.

Dezi took a step back, place a hand on her stomach as she felt it convulse. She swallowed hard at the bile coming up her throat, just managing to keep it down. Whatever that box was, something about it made Dezi want to destroy it – a violent reaction that she tried to tell herself was _not_ rational. But a voice, a female’s voice cold and hard hissed back that it was rational and if she just remembered then she would know why.

The Doctor, Yana, and Jack were oblivious to the discomfort Dezi felt when she saw the box. The Doctor clapped Yana on the shoulder with a wide beam on his face and cheerfully informed him, “Professor, it’s a wild stab in the dark, but I may just have found all three of you a way out.”

As the Doctor and Jack went off to work on something, Dezi looked over at her brother to see him with a distant expression on his face. He placed a hand on the screen, as if he wanted to reach out and touch the blue box. He turned to Dezi and for a moment, he had those wild eyes that scared her. But then there was a clang of outside and whatever had possessed Yana passed.

Dezi, however, still felt ill, and this illness was only amplified when she saw the blue box just inside the lab. She couldn’t help but feel it was mocking her, laughing at her for how she was reacting to it. After all, it was just a stupidly painted box.

Sucking in a deep breath, she watched as calmly as possible as the Doctor grabbed a chord and plugged it into an outlet, winking at the siblings. “Extra power. Little bit of a cheat, but who’s counting?” He turned to Jack and commanded, “Help Dezi with the retro-feeds.”

Jack nodded and walked over, giving Dezi a wide smile with bright white teeth practically sparkling at her. Despite Dezi being set against him from the start, she couldn’t help but grudging admit to herself that Jack was useful. She didn’t have to explain anything to him twice and he worked in a thankful silence, only occasionally speaking to himself.

The two worked, Dezi hardly noticing when Martha and Chantho returned or when Yana sat down heavily in a chair. While she did glance at her brother in concern, she could see Chantho already heading over to him.

She glanced over to Jack, seeing him instruct Martha in a stern manner, ordering her to do the same job she had just done, but quicker. She could see that Martha was taken aback by Jack’s harsh tone and had actually shied away from the man when she had responded with a “Yes, sir.”

Going back to her work, Dezi allowed her eyes to flick up to Yana, voyeuristically watching as the Doctor and her brother spoke in a low tone. She could tell Yana was talking about his headaches and the drumming like noises he heard during them. She had always figured that it was just Yana’s heartbeat he was hearing but she had never pushed the issue because Yana always got so agitated at the topic and would usually snap at her viciously.

This time, though, it was different. Dezi was surprised to see Yana slowly get to his feet and offer the Doctor a tired smile, just as she was surprised to see the Doctor’s brow furrow in clear concern. Biting her lip, she thought about walking over to the Doctor and asking what her brother had said, but Dezi controlled herself and continued working. 

Besides monitoring levels, they needed to set up a feed to contact Lt. Atillo so they could keep an eye on the radiation chamber for the rocket. Anyone who went into the room without protective gear would die instantly, and that protective gear would be useless if the levels rose too high. In the lab, they would have to monitor the radiation levels, keeping whomever was in the chamber safe and no vaporized.

Yana was sitting at the computer, waiting for Lt. Atillo to come through. _“Professor, are you getting me?”_ Lt. Atillo’s asked, his face slowly appearing on the screen. While it wasn’t the clearest or best connection, feedback lines would break through and cut the man’s face in half, it would work. It _had_ to work.

“I’m here! We’re ready!” Yana shouted back. “Now all you need to do is connect the couplings. Then we can launch,” he started to explain to Lt. Atillo, but then the picture cut out completely and Yana cursed and hit the screen. “God sakes! This equipment! Needs rebooting all the time!”

Dezi glanced at the levels, allowing herself a small smile when she saw that they hadn’t shifted. Stable was good, stable meant the levels weren’t going to suddenly sky rocket. She looked back to see Martha now sitting at the computer, diligently waiting for it to come back on.

_“Are you still there?”_

“Ah, present and correct. Send your man inside. We’ll keep the levels down from here,” Yana said from over Martha’s shoulder.

There was a pause and then Lt. Atillo’s voice came in a softer, stressed filled whisper, “He’s inside. And good luck to him.”

Dezi turned to Jack, pointing at a dial. “Make sure that stays below the red,” she ordered. Jack nodded dutifully.

“Where is that room?” The Doctor asked, pausing in his work to see what was going on.

“It’s underneath the rocket. Fix the couplings and the footprint can work. But the entire chamber is flooded with stet radiation,” Yana explained, his eyes never leaving the screen.

“Stet? Never heard of it.”

“You wouldn’t want to. But it’s safe enough. We can hold the radiation back from here.”

Anxiously, the lab waited in baited breath as the person in the chamber worked on the couplings. When an alarm began to sound, Dezi placed a hand on her beating heart, looking over at the levels. “That’s 0.2; keep it level,” she reminded him, looking at the scanner. 0.2 wasn’t close to the red, but anywhere besides 0.01 was too close for comfort. Stet radiation was tricky and could easily jump levels. It was equally as likely for the levels to go to 0.4 or 100.

The lights flickered ominously before shutting off, red lights turning on automatically. Alarms started to blast through the lab. Exchanging horrified looks, Dezi and Jack started to work on the levels frantically, trying to bring them down. But every time Dezi risked a glance at the levels, she could see the arrow pointing closer and closer to the red. 

“Radiation’s rising,” she warned Yana in a tight voice.

“We’ve lost control!” Jack corrected.

Yana turned to the monitor and warned Lt. Atillo desperately, “The chamber’s going to flood.”

The Doctor turned to Jack, pointing his finger at him as he shouted his command, “Jack! Override the vents!”

Dezi continued work frantically as Jack tried to override the vents, hoping that sucking the radiation out would give the person in the chamber just a bit more time. But it was no use and Jack growled in frustration, hitting the console with his hand.

Looking over at him, Dezi paused as he saw him look at two live cables on the ground, sparking intensely. “You’re not…” she said slowly, her eyes widening as Jack walked over to the cables and held them up so they were chest level.

“We can jump start the override!” he told the Doctor.

Even as the Doctor yelled out in protest, “Don’t! It’s going to flare!” Jack pressed the cables together. Just as the Doctor had warned, the cables flared and the current flowed through Jack. All the other occupants of the lab could do was watch as Jack cried out before falling to the ground, dead.

Martha ran over to Jack’s body, the first to react to the sudden death. “I’ve got him,” she told the others, her voice rushed but still calm.

Chantho started to edge over to the cables which were still close to Jack and Martha. “Chan—don’t touch the cables—tho,” she warned as she nudged the cables aside.

Dezi stepped out from behind the levels, placing a hand on Yana’s shoulder when she met up with him. Seeing any death was hard, but as she and Yana got older, death touched them in a different way. It was almost a reminder of what was coming for them.

“Oh, I’m so sorry,” Yana said in a soft voice, turning to the Doctor with a grim frown as Martha started CPR.

The Doctor had not moved from his spot and was just staring at Jack’s body, an odd, thoughtful expression on his face as he watched the corps. “The chamber’s flooded with radiation, yes?”

“The engines cannot start without the couplings,” Dezi reminded him with a frown. “This was all for nothing.”

“Oh I don’t know,” the Doctor replied. He finally moved towards Jack, but it was only to pull Martha away from him. “Martha, leave him.”

“You’ve gotta let me try,” Martha protested, fighting against the Doctor’s grip.

The Doctor just turned Martha to him, looking her in the face with a stern expression on his face. “Come on. Come on. Just listen to me. Now leave him alone,” he ordered. When Martha nodded, though it was clear she did _not_ agree with the Doctor, he turned to Yana with a half-smile on his face. “It strikes me, Professor, you’ve got a room a man can’t enter without dying. Is that correct?”

Yana stared at the Doctor, his face dropping at the reminder of the situation they were in. Dezi felt herself bristled at the man’s question, but before she could snap at the man, Yana answered, “Yes.”

“Well…” the Doctor started, his voice trailing off as Jack jerked upright, gasping for air desperately. While everyone jumped, the Doctor just calmly removed his glasses and gave Yana a smile. “I’ve got just the man.”

“Was someone kissing me?” Jack asked, his hand going to his mouth with a frown.

* * *

It took little – none, actually – for Jack to agreed to go to a chamber full of stet radiation, even when Dezi informed him of all the nasty side effects stet had given to the few who had survived an encounter with it. Yana ended up being the one that needed convincing. He had paced back and forth while trying to work it out before the Doctor gently cut into his ramblings to say, “He’s impossible.”

Yana had ended up needing to sit down, rubbing his head as he watched Jack and the Doctor run from the lab.

Dezi, looking down at the levels, shook her head. There would be no gain to see that the chamber was completely filled with stet radiation, clearly he would survive it. So she walked over to Martha and stood next to her, waiting as Martha tried to contact the Doctor.

“We lost picture when that thing flared up. Doctor, are you there?” Martha asked. She had checked her watch, waiting a few minutes to give the Doctor time to run to the chamber.

_“Receiving, yeah. He’s inside.”_ The Doctor reported, his voice casual.

“And still alive?”

_“Oh, yes.”_

From his chair, Yana looked over at the screen with wide eyes. “But he should evaporate. What sort of a man is he?” he asked Martha.

Martha frowned and turned in the chair to look at Yana properly. “I’ve only just met him. The Doctor sort of travels through time and space and picks people up. God, I make us sound like stray dogs. Maybe we are.”

“Time travel?” Dezi scoffed, her arms crossing.

When Martha nodded, Yana let out a slow ‘puff’ of air. “He travels in time?” He breathed.

Martha shrugged. “Don’t ask me to explain it. That’s a TARDIS. The sports car of time travel, he says.”

Dezi slowly looked over at the blue box, the TARDIS. The name, like the few times she had heard it before in her head, sounded familiar. She winced, feeling an almost echo of the word shifting from Martha’s voice to the same cold female as before. _‘That’s a TARDIS…‘That’s a TARDIS…’_

“Martha,” Dezi asked, making the woman look at her. “Does time traveling have symptoms or side effects?”

Martha paused, mulling the question over. “Headaches, confusion, and nausea, though the last bit might be because the Doctor’s a bad driver.”

Dezi frowned; she thought about asking whether or not voices went along with the headaches, but she thought better of it. Martha seemed smart enough to know that hearing voices was not normal anywhere, including at the silo.

So she kept her mouth shut, listening instead to the conversation the Doctor was having with Jack.

_“That’s why I left you behind. It’s not easy even just…just looking at you Jack, ‘cause you’re wrong,”_ the Doctor was explaining, his voice almost hoarse with remembered pain.

_“Thanks.”_

_“You are, I can’t help it. I’m a Time Lord. It’s instinct. It’s in my guts. You’re a fixed point in time a space. You’re a fact. That’s never meant to happen. Even the TARDIS reacted against you—tried to shake you off. Flew all the way to the end of the universe just to get rid of you.”_

_“So what you’re saying is that you’re, uh, prejudiced?”_

_“I never thought of it like that.”_

_“Yeah.”_

Dezi frowned as the conversation continued. Some of the words, like TARDIS, seemed to echo in her mind. _‘Time Lord…fixed point.’_ She winced and rubbed at her forehead, feeling a pit settle in her stomach as the two men continued.

_“Last thing I remember back when I was mortal…I was facing three Daleks. Death by extermination. And then I came back to life. What happened?”_

The words _‘Dalek…’_ echoed in Dezi’s head so loudly that they drowned out what the Doctor and Jack were saying to each other.

_“No one’s ever mean to have that power. If a Time Lord did that, he’d become a god, a vengeful god. But she was human,”_ the Doctor was saying when Dezi was finally able to hear him.

She wanted to ask who they were talking about, but a glance at Martha’s face – which was in a firm frown – made her hold her tongue. Whoever the Doctor and Jack were talking about, Martha clearly did not like her.

_“Do you think she could change me back?”_

_“I took the power out of her. She’s gone, Jack. She’s not just living on a parallel world, she’s trapped there. The walls have closed.”_

_“I’m sorry.”_

_“Yep.”_

All the words now were starting to mull together, making it hard to think, let alone listen to what the Doctor was saying. As if it might help she took a step back from the monitor, and then another, but that just put her closer to the TARDIS. Just look at the box made her wince from a sudden stab of pain.

Starting to become concerned, she looked over at Yana to see if he had noticed. But he seemed to be just as distance as she felt. He was staring at the TARDIS his hand raised as if he wanted to touch it. When Yana turned around, his hand falling limply to his side, Dezi frowned deeply as she saw tears running down his face.

As if some sort of signal had gone off, Martha also turned around, taking in the two siblings. “What’s wrong?” she asked, though the source of her concern was unclear.

“Chan—Professor, what is it—tho?” Chantho asked, looking at Yana.

Yana shook his head slowly. “Time travel. They say there was time travel back in the old days. I never believed. But what would I know? I’m just a stupid old man. Never could keep time. Always late, always lost. Even this thing never worked,” he explained bitterly, pulling out a familiar fob watch and looking down at it.

The fob watch, broken since Dezi and Yana could remember, was a part of a pair – Dezi had the other one. Both had circles raised on the once silver surface, but the circles were in different patterns. When they were young, both had pretended the broken watches meant something different – that _they_ were different. But as time went on, they had never paid attention to the watches, allowing them to collect dust in a jacket pocket.

“Time and time and time again. Always running out on me,” Yana said with a shake of his head, glancing briefly at the watch.

Martha got up from the chair and walked over to Yana, an odd expression on her face as she stared down at the watch. “Can I have a look at that?” she asked in a slow voice.

Yana frowned slightly. “Oh, it’s only an old relic,” he said with a chuckle. “Like me.”

“I don’t think mine is that old,” Dezi protested lightly. Without even thinking about it, she pulled the watch from her own pocket, looking at briefly. “I am younger.”

Martha stared at the two, her eyes widening as she took in not one, but _two_ fob watches. Two very, very familiar fob watches. “Where did you get them?”

“Hm?” Yana hummed, not really paying attention in favor of staring at the fob watch. It had been such a long time since he had truly looked at it…he had forgotten how the circles used to reflect the light, how they had become a source of amusement for two bored children.

“We were found with it,” Dezi answered, not even noticing how light her voice had become as she too was looking at her fob watch with newfound curiosity.

“What do you mean?”

“Yana and I were orphans in a storm,” Dezi recited, “He and I were naked – he was a child and I was just a baby in his arms. We were found off the coast of the Silver Devastation. Abandoned with only the watches.”

“Have you opened it?”

“Why would we? It’s broken,” Yana reminded Martha slowly, moving his gaze from his watch to look at Martha with growing concern.

“How do you know it’s broken if you never opened it?” Martha challenged.

Yana blinked, looking over at Dezi with a frown. “I don’t know,” he answered, looking back down at the fob watch.

“Does it matter?” Dezi asked Martha, looking up from her fob watch.

“No. It’s…nothing. It’s…Listen, everything’s fine up here. I’m gonna see if the Doctor needs me.” Her rushed sentence done, Martha hurried from the room, leaving Yana and Dezi to look at the fob watches in their hands and Chantho to watch them carefully.

* * *

The Doctor was surprised when he heard a clatter from someone, and even more surprised when that clattered turned out to be Martha. He didn’t really pay much attention to her, instead focusing on sending the rocket off as quickly as possible.

Martha, however, not excepting this, moved in front of his work so he had to look at her. “Doctor, it’s the professor and Dezi. They’ve got these watches. They’ve got fobwatches. They’re the same as yours. Same writing on it. Same…everything,” she explained quickly, her hand flapping a bit as she spoke.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” the Doctor said with a frown. It was impossible to be the same fobwatch as his – each one was created specifically for the Time Lord; they always had the name of the Time Lord, or Lady, on it. They could _not_ have his.

“I asked them. They said they’ve had it all their lives,” Martha pressed.

“So they’ve got the same watches,” Jack said from somewhere behind the Doctor, also working to make the rocket fly.

“Yeah, but it’s not a watch. It’s this chameleon thing,” Martha tried to explain to Jack.

Knowing that her explanation made no sense to _him,_ and he actually knew what she was talking about, the Doctor chimed into the conversation. “No, no, no. It’s this…This thing, this device, it rewrites biology, changes a Time Lord into a human.”

“And it’s the same watch,” Martha repeated empathetically.

The Doctor shook his head and set his mouth into a hard line. “It can’t be,” he protested with a firm note in his voice.

His attention was taken by an alarm blaring. Recognizing it, the Doctor quickly headed over to the levers needed to fix it and worked on it. His mind was whirling with what Martha was implying. He had already noted how similar the professor was to…an old friend. An old enemy, really. They had spent much longer as foes trying to kill each other then childhood friends.

“That means he could be a Time Lord. You might not be the last one,” Jack said, voicing what the Doctor already was thinking.

Instead of answering him, the Doctor barked, “Jack, keep it level!”

“But that’s brilliant, isn’t it?” Martha asked, staring at the Doctor with her wide eyes and a smile on her face.

The Doctor stared at the console, unable to look at Martha and see how hopeful she was about the entire thing. He didn’t hold it against her – he was prone to making the past better than it was – but it still made him frustrated to see her happy about this possibility.

As hypocritical as it was, he still replied with, “Yes, it is. Course it is.” And then he paused, thinking back on the conversation he had with Yana about the drums in his head. “Depends which one. Brilliant, fantastic, yeah. But they died, the Time Lords. All of them, they died.”

“Not if they were human,” Jack pointed out.

Swallowing hard, the Doctor turned to Martha, a horrible thought hitting him. To get so much information from the siblings she had to have pressed them to a point where they were actively thinking on the watch and if they were actively thinking…“What did they say, Martha?” When Martha didn’t reply he repeated himself at a yell, “What did they say?”

Martha inhaled sharply at the sudden burst from the Doctor. “They looked at the watches like they could hardly see it. Like that perception filter thing,” she remembered, closing her eyes as she spoke.

“What about now? Can they see it now?”

* * *

Dezi stared down at the watch, aware that her brother was doing the same with his. She could hear voices, so many voices swirling around in her head. _‘The TARDIS. The time vortex. Time travel. Time Lord.’_

She couldn’t tell the source of where the voices came from, nor could she tell who had said in the first place. All she could tell was that they were all shifting to a hard female’s voice. _‘The voices all the damn time. Never-ending, never stopping. Open me. Open the light and summon me and remember who you are. Remember him.’_

She wasn’t aware of Chantho edging towards them, her bug-like face filled with concern. “Chan – Dezi and Yana, won’t you please take some rest – tho?”

* * *

“If they escaped the Time War then it’s the perfect place to hide. The end of the universe,” Jack theorized.

The Doctor continued to work on the rocket. They were so close to getting it launched, he just needed to do two more things.

“Think of what the Face of Boe said. His dying words. He said…” as Martha reminded him of something he had not forgotten, the Doctor set off the rocket.

And then he felt it, a consciousness he not only recognized but _knew_ personally. How could he forget the feeling when they had first spoken mentally? And then he felt another consciousness and he felt his mouth dry as he recognized that one as well. Everyone would…the mad woman was known on Gallifrey.

As Martha repeated what the Face of Boe had said, the Doctor raced over to the computer and typed it ‘Y.’

“You.”

‘A.’

“Are.”

‘N.”

“Not.”

‘A.’

“Alone.”

When the Doctor was done, ‘YANA’ blinked on the computer screen. He felt nauseous as he stared at it.

* * *

In the lab, Chantho said in a soft, squeaky voice, “Chan—Professor Yana and Dezi—tho?”

For the first time, Dezi noticed how _annoying_ the little insect was. She scoffed at herself for thinking Chantho was her friend. Chantho was nothing but a pest.

She turned slowly, aware her brother was doing the same. By the way Chantho’s face dropped, Dezi knew their eyes must have changed, that their faces must have hardened. 

* * *

Worried that _he_ had done something to the rocket, the Doctor grabbed the phone connected to it and yelled into it, “Lieutenant, have you achieved velocity? Have you done it? Lieutenant! Have you done it?”

_“Affirmative. We’ll see you in Utopia.”_

Not wasting time to correct the man, the Doctor hung up the phone and then sprinted for the lab, Martha and Jack hot on his heels. He knew, though, with every beat of his hearts that _they_ knew he was coming.

* * *

Dezi’s brother casually threw a lever to lock the main door. “That won’t stop him for long,” Dezi muttered. The Doctor was a determined man when things were taken from him or harmed and now they had his TARDIS.

No Time Lord would ever part with their TARDIS, especially if they’ve bonded with it, which the Doctor surely had done. He was one of those Time Lords who thought the TARDIS’ were alive and not just helpful tools.

“Chan—but you’ve locked them in—tho,” Chantho squeaked in protest.

Dezi’s brother gave Chantho what he thought might be a friendly smile – something that ‘Yana’ would have given her, perhaps. “Not to worry, my dear. As one door closes, another must open.”

He nodded to Dezi and she gleefully flipped the switch, knowing that the main gate had just been powered down and the Futurekind would be scurrying into the silo.

“Chan—you must stop—tho!”

This time neither sibling bothered to placate the distressed Chantho, instead choosing to work in the lab quickly in effectively. While they had the Doctor squirming now, Dezi was right when she had warned that the door would not hold him back for long. If they wanted to fulfill the plans they had created as soon as they had awoken, they had to be quick.

“Chan—but you’ve lowered the defences! The Futurekind will get in—tho!” Chantho protested from somewhere behind them. When neither answered her, she spoke again but in a more mournful tone. “Chan—Professor and Dezi, I’m so sorry but I must stop you two. You’re both destroying all our work—tho.”

The words, the implications in them really, made the siblings turn to see Chantho holding a safety gun. It was only stocked with one bullet and it was made specifically to kill the shooter if the Futurekind ever got in.

Dezi smirked, knowing that Chantho would go for her brother first. She looked to him, delighting to see a matching smirk on his face as he held out one of the live cables that had killed dashing Jack. “Oh…now I can say I was provoked,” he said in a low voice. Chantho stared at the wire, her hand shaking heavily as she struggled to fire her gun. “Did you never think, in all those years standing beside us, to ask about those watches? Never? Did you never think, not ever, that you could set us free?”

“Chan—I’m sorry—tho. Chan—I’m so sorry,” Chantho whimpered.

Her brother just rolled his eyes. “And you with your ‘chan’ and your ‘tho’ driving me insane,” he snapped savagely.

“Chan—Professor, please—” Chantho begged, her eyes widening as Dezi’s brother advanced on her slowly, menacingly.

“That is not my name! The Professor…was an invention; just like how Dezi was an invention. So perfect a disguise that we forgot who we are.”

“Chan—who are you—tho?” Chantho asked, her eyes skirting between the siblings.

“I am the Master,” the Master said. “And she is Dezi.” He thrusted the cable forward and Dezi watched as Chantho died.

The insect laid on the floor no longer distracted them from their work. Dezi started to work on making sure they had everything. She looked over to see the Master pick up the Doctor’s hand and stare at it; he placed his hands on the glass around it, watching as the fingers trembled.

“Professor!” the Doctor had finally arrived to the lab door and was pounding on the glass. “Dezi, Professor, let me in! Let me in! Jack, get the door open!”

Ignoring him easily, the Master walked over the navigation chart, the one leading to ‘Utopia,’ and stared down at it with a scoff.

“Professor! Dezi! Professor, Dezi, where are you two?! Professor! Dezi! Professor, Dezi, are you two there?! Please, I need to explain! Whatever you two do, don’t open those watches!”

“Utopia,” Dezi sneered, walking up behind her brother. Her brother shook his head, crumbling up the navigation chart in favor of picking up the circuit board to hand to Dezi.

“It’s heavy,” he warned tauntingly. In response, she stuck her tongue out at him.

“Professor! Dezi!”

As Dezi set the circuit board in the TARDIS next to the Doctor’s hand, the Master started to pull the cables from the machine.

“Open the door, please! I’m begging you both, Professor! Dezi! Please! Listen to me!”

Dezi clucked her tongue. “I grow weary of him,” she announced. She turned to go and snap at him, to taunt him into silence…but all she felt was a burning pain as Chantho shot her with the forgotten gun.

“How dare you!” the Master roared, turning at the noise. He grabbed the second live cable and thrusted it at Chantho, succeeding in killing her. Turning to his sister, he swore in a forgotten language.

“I need to regenerate,” Dezi murmured.

The Master nodded slowly. Carefully, he lifted her into the TARDIS, moving her out of sight from the door even as the Doctor finally succeeded with his quest to get into the lab.

He moved to the front, just outside the TARDIS and smirked as the Doctor ran frantically into the room and took it in. When the Doctor spotted him, the Master thrilled at how his eyes darken and his face hardened. He took a step, but the Master backed into the TARDIS and locked it. He strolled to the console, flipping as switch that prevented the Doctor from being able to open the TARDIS with his own key. Hearing a whirling noise, he flipped another switch that made it impossible for the Doctor to use that as well.

“Deadlocked,” he pronounced.

Clearly the Doctor had been around humans far too long, because his next step to get in was brute force. He pounded on the TARDIS doors. “Let me in! Let me in!”

“I’m begging you! Everything’s changed! It’s only the three of us! We’re the only ones left!”

As if Dezi hadn’t already told him that. The Master scoffed, making sure the Doctor heard him. He turned to his sister, smiling grimly as a golden glow appeared around her. He made no move to keep away from the incoming regeneration, even though he knew the rules.

Any Time Lord, or Lady, close to a regeneration would regenerate themselves. The rule had made it so easy for the Daleks to win in the Time War; all they need was to trigger one regeneration and then everyone around them would regenerate as well, creating a mass slaughter.

“Just let me in,” the Doctor cried out frantically.

The Master did not reply, choosing to allow his last moments as an old man to focus on what form he wanted next. As the golden light started around him, matching the one around his sister, the Master couldn’t help but chuckle, “If the Doctor can be young and strong, then so can we.”

Despite how much he didn’t want to, the Master screamed out along with his sister. The golden light filled the TARDIS as if it too wanted to make sure the Doctor knew exactly what was happening and exactly what he couldn’t stop.

When the regeneration process was done, the Master woke up on the grown next to the Doctor’s hand. He looked up to see Dezi staring down at him, looking as if she was in her mid- to late thirties.

“We’re both blonde, Kosch,” Dezi reported with a small smile that her brother gave back.

She helped him to his feet and they looked outside at the door, hearing the frantic yells from the Doctor and his band of humans.

“Young?” the Master asked, and Dezi nodded.

“Ha, ha! Ha, ha, ha!” As if he wanted to prove it to himself, he ran around the console, making sure to not hit Dezi as she turned on the speaker so their voices would be projected to the Doctor and his friends. “Doctor – “ Dezi started in what sounded like a low and menacing voice, but then she giggled. “I don’t think I can pull that off.”

Laughing at her, the Master took his turn to speak to the Doctor. “Hello,” he greeted in a high-pitched voice. “Hello,” he repeated in a much lower voice. “Hello,” he said normally.

“Anyway, why don’t we stop and have a nice little chat while I tell you all my plans and you can work out a way to stop me? I don’t think!”

“I’m asking you really properly! Just stop! Just think!” the Doctor yelled.

“If you want us to, use our names,” Dezi demanded.

“Master, Dezi. I’m sorry.”

“Tough!” the Master nodded to Dezi who started the controls for the TARDIS.

The Doctor did something outside that made the console spark. Dezi jerked back from it, hissing at the burn. “You hurt my sister!” the Master snapped. He took over for the controls, getting the TARDIS back to taking off. “End of the universe. Have fun. Bye bye!”

“Doctor, stop them!” Martha yelled.

But it was too late. Dezi knew the Doctor would be standing there, a horrified expression on his face as he stared at the TARDIS taking off with Dezi and the Master inside.


	4. The Sound of Drums Pt. 1: Good to be King

Dezi felt the Doctor return, just as the Master did. But unlike her dear brother, she also heard his arrival. She had already expected that; had already prepared for it. By the time she knew the Doctor would be arriving, she was seat on a chair with a notepad balanced on her leg. Her eyes were unseeing as she scribbled down the words, focusing as hard as she could on what the Doctor was saying and, more importantly, what was going on around him.

The last part had always been hard for her, it was why she hadn’t ended up picked by Rassilon and why, she had realized only recently, that she was still alive.

She stopped writing, swallowing hard as she looked down at the page. If a human were to look at it, they would think it was an odd form of short hand, but it was so much more. Old High Gallifreyan was not easy to write, but Gallifreyan itself _was._

Folding the page neatly, she slipped it into the clutch she was carrying. She stood up slowly, smoothing the bottom of her dress out as she waited for her brother. All their work had paid off today, as they knew it would, and now she would be able to give him the best news.

The door opened as the Master stepped out, a confident grin on his face. Dezi took a deep breath and then ran over to him, playing her part oh so well.

“Harry I’m so proud! I’ve just called our old doctor and he was so happy for you,” she said in a manufactured breathless voice.

She could tell her got the message when that familiar gleam entered his eyes. “I’ll make sure to mention him in my message to the public,” he said, raising his voice with the last bit to the chorus of cameras’ taking photos of the two siblings.

The tabloids had fallen in love with Daniella Saxon the same way they had fallen in love with Harold Saxon. Daniella was sweet and kind and an icon for the ladies just as Harold was powerful and bold and the picture of masculinity.

Of course Dezi and the Master despised the roles they had to play in front of the cameras. It would be so much better to simply kill the humans and take over Earth, giving the Doctor an apocalypse to confront. But taking over a planet took far longer than six months – even for a Time Lord and Lady working together.

As the siblings walked down the hallway and two the front steps, Dezi made sure to keep the sickly-sweet smile plastered to her face. She knew if she looked over at her brother he would have the grin that had, reportedly, made women swoon before. The mere thought made her want to gag but she had taught herself how to school her face long before becoming Daniella Saxon.

As the doors were pushed open for them, Dezi and the Master ascended the steps. They could hear newscasters’ speaking into their microphones, trying desperately to say something different from the others. It meant nothing to Dezi, she already knew what they were going to say.

“Mr. and Ms. Saxon have returned from the Palace and are greeting the crowd inside Saxon Headquarters,” or at least some variation of that.

A bold photographer called over the descending couple, “Mr Saxon, this way, sir.  Come on, hug for the lady, sir.”

Playing along, the Master gave Dezi a hug, which Dezi returned dutifully. She was truly proud of her brother, but their family had never been big on displays of affection. For them, a smile and words of praise were enough – a hug was for something big like graduating from the Academy.

_‘The Master is the Prime Minster of Great Britain. The Master and his sister,’_ the Doctor gasped in Dezi’s head.

Ignoring him, the Master moved to the podium at the front of the staircase and looked at Dezi. _‘He’s watching.’_

To the reporters to the look seemed like a sweet moment between brother and sister, something that the morning news shows would talk about and the tabloids would write about. But to Dezi and the Master it was so much more.

With his smile growing, the Master addressed the nation. “This country has been sick.  This country needs healing.  This country needs medicine.  In fact, I’d go so far as to say that, what this country really needs, right now…is a doctor,” his speech done, he smiled into the camera and _winked._

* * *

Eighteen months. It had only taken eighteen months for new comer Harold Saxon to have the entire country of Britain in love with him and his sister. All they had to do was create a satellite network that broadcasted their message to everyone who had it. It made people follow their slogan ‘Vote Saxon’ frenzy. And they had voted, of course. They voted for him to create the UNIT _Valiant,_ they voted for him to become Minister of Defense, and they voted for him to become Prime Minister.

Dezi was impressed, for sure, but not as impressed as she would have been had they been on any other planet. Through her time as Daniella Saxon, she had learned that the humans were a lost cause when it came to intelligence. Somehow, they didn’t see a problem with Harold Saxon existing for six months, but then again, that might have been the Archangle network in play.

The Archangle network had been released as a more affordable cell service. It was faster then the human ones, mainly because the satellites were made out of TARDIS parts, and it had the nice insurance of protecting them against the past Doctors.

Dezi had been the one to suggest it. She had felt a past Doctor when she had landed, closing herself off to him as quickly as possible; since _their_ Doctor knew nothing about them, it was clear that he had brushed the brief connection with Dezi aside. But it had been too close of a call and closing that connection _hurt;_ it gave Dezi horrible headaches and it made her tired and irritable.

The Master had built the satellites and gotten them placed in the air within their first month on Earth, putting his own plan on hold to make sure there was no way they could be taken out of the air. Dezi had cried when the Master had come down and had hugged him. For the first time since they had landed on Earth, Dezi opened a psychic connection between her and her brother and thanked him over and over again.

But that had been months ago, and it did no good to linger on their past when there was _so much_ to do in the present. The Doctor was there, in London, and Dezi could feel him trying to reach out psychically. She was almost impressed that he had remembered her ability and was attempting to use it, but the fact that he actually thought she was stupid enough to let him connect with her made her feelings go more towards amused.

She thought about teasing him and wondered if he would fall for her having a sudden change in heart about her brother, but the Master had pulled her aside and had reminded her that nothing could be revealed to the Doctor; any passing thought when she was connected to him could ruin the entire situation.

So instead, Dezi had played the perfect sister. She walked down the hall next to her brother with a large grin, not at all bothered by the way her brother was at all the file folders being thrust upon him.

“Finance report, sir.”

“Military protocol, sir.”

“EC directive, sir.”

“Annual budget, sir.”

“Recommendations, sir.”

Dezi bit back a laugh when she saw the way her brother was trying to balance the folders just next to the Cabinet Room’s doors. She knew he would never ask for the help that he so clearly needed, so she took it upon herself to open the doors for him.

“I’m so proud of you, Harry,” she said while the staff around them tittered in approval.

The Master smiled, “Bless.”

The clacking of heels made Dezi glance behind her; she couldn’t help but smile at the sight of Letitia “Tish” Jones walking over to them; Tish was Martha’s sister and was no where near as interesting as her sister was, something Tish was well aware of and _not_ happy about. When she had been interviewed, she had gone on a delicious rant on her phone with her mother just outside the room, saying that Martha thought she was too _good_ for their family since she hadn’t been taking calls. Her anger at her sister was good, and, more importantly, usable. She had been hired immediately even though their were much better applicants.

Of course, it was only a matter of time for Tish to notice that she didn’t have a job description, and a few questions would reveal that _no one_ knew what she was supposed to do. Dezi was slightly surprised that Tish had had the nerve to come and ask the Prime Minster himself what she was supposed to do; judging by the look on Tish’s face, she was deeply regretting her action.

But since Dezi and her brother had _clearly_ seen her, Tish had no choice but to stop next to them and say, “Uh, sir…If you don’t mind me asking…I’m sorry, but it’s all a bit new.  What exactly do you want me to do?”

_‘Is nothing really so hard to comprehend?’_ Dezi glanced at her brother, seeing a hint of amusement in his eyes that no one, not even Tish who was staring at him directly, would notice.

“Oh yes, what was it, uh..?” the Master asked, pointedly not replying to what Dezi had asked.

“Tish.  Letitia Jones,” Tish answered quickly.

“Tish.  Well then, Tish…You just stand there and look gorgeous,” leaving Tish to chew on his words, the Master gave a firm nod to his sister before he stepped into the Cabinet Room, Dezi closing the doors behind him.

It wasn’t like she needed to see what would happen, she already knew and could already picture it. She couldn’t help but smile a small smile at the mere thought of what the Doctor would say if he knew what the Master was doing to his precious humans.

But as her thoughts turned her the Doctor, she didn’t notice the connection opening up just a small bit, allowing her to connect to the Doctor mentally, and the Doctor noticed. Closing her eyes to concentrate, she slammed the connection closed, registering the Doctor saying her name frantically before it ended.

Glancing at the Cabinet Room doors, she turned to Tish with a tight smile, “Why don’t you help me for the day?” she offered in the practiced voice of Daniella Saxon. In answer, Tish smiled widely and nodded her head like one of those infernal bobble heads.

* * *

The Doctor stumbled into Martha’s flat; he could feel Jack’s and Martha’s gaze on him, but he brushed aside their unspoken concern with a quick, “I’m fine. Just a headache.”

He sat down on the couch heavily, far more heavily than he intended to, and looked around the flat. He had only seen it briefly when he dropped Martha off at the Lazarus thing, but now he was able to fully take in the features. He was pleasantly surprised by it; the way Martha talked about it he thought he was about to walk into something a bit bigger than a refrigerator box, but this was no worse than some of the rooms in his TARDIS.

He rubbed at his head absentmindedly; Time Lords were decidedly more psychic than humans, but it was exhausting for the average Time Lord to psychically connect to another person strongly enough to communicate over it. Dezi though…Dezi was something else.

He looked over at Jack, about to ask him a question, but he found the man _on his phone,_ as if they weren’t about to enemies of the state. “Jack, who are you phoning?  You can’t tell anyone we’re here!”

“Just some friends of mine, but there’s no reply…” Jack replied slowly; he put down the phone and stared at it in clear frustration.

Had the had the time, the Doctor would have probably pressed Jack further, but Martha handed her laptop to him and the Doctor put Jack’s friendship issues out of his mind. Making to open the laptop, he frowned when Jack took it from him and set it up on Martha’s small desk. “I can show you the Saxon websites. They’ve been around for ages,” he explained as he sat down.

Martha shook her head, “That’s so weird though.  It’s the day after the election.  That’s only four days after I met you.”

“We went flying all around the universe while they were here the whole time,” the Doctor replied with just a hint of frustration in his voice. He had hoped that his work on the TARDIS would be more exact, but he supposed a bit over a year would have to do.

“You gonna tell us who they are?” Martha asked after sharing a look with Jack that she _thought_ the Doctor didn’t see, but she really wasn’t sneaky and neither was Jack – the Doctor doubted Jack knew how to be subtle, it wasn’t like that skill would have helped him at the Time Agency.

“They’re Time Lords.”

Martha rolled her eyes, “What about the rest of it?” she pressed, “I mean, who’d calls themselves the ‘Master?’ Why doesn’t this Dezi chick have a fancy name?”

“That’s all you need to know,” the Doctor replied firmly. He turned himself to Jack to give him an impatient look, “Come on, show me the Saxons.”

* * *

Helping her for the day was probably boring, but Dezi didn’t care about the levels of entertainment that Tish was getting in her job. She had walked with the girl who yammered on and on about how she was so happy Dezi’s brother had won and not the other man who was running until they had reached sitting room doors. There, Dezi had turned to Tish and given her one very clear instruction: “Don’t let anyone bother me.”

Tish had done the same bobble head nodding from before, “Of course. Do you need me to get anything?”

“No,” Dezi had answered firmly. She had then walked into the room, making sure to shut the doors before Tish could follow her, and had immediately sat down on the couch and taken off the horrendous heels she had been wearing all day.

She had been horrified when the Master had held up a pair of black heels – pumps, they were apparently called – and a tight looking dress with some weird thing – shapewear, she had found out. She had been even more horrified when she found out that humans _everywhere_ wore these torture devices. Even the Gallifreyan formal robes, as uncomfortable as they were, had not gotten close to as horrible as human items. Time Ladies didn’t stop themselves from breathing or mess up their feet just to look _pretty._

She bent over on the couch to rub the soles of her feet and groaned with approval at the firm pressure.

_‘Kosch, I think you owe me a foot rub.’_

_‘Get Tish to do it.’_

_‘I don’t think Tish knows what a foot is.’_

_‘True…’_

She jerked up, hearing voices in the hall and one of them was Tish’s, “You can’t just go barging in!”

That was the only warning she had before the door burst open and an older woman with her hair pulled back walked into the room with a wide grin on her face. Dezi could just make out Tish’s horrified expression over the woman’s shoulder and she couldn’t help but roll her eyes.

“Ms. Saxon, Vivien Rook, _Sunday Mirror,”_ she introduced and flashed a card with her name on it, “You’ve heard of me.”

Dezi hadn’t, but she didn’t see the point about telling the woman that; the Master had felt their connection cut off and would be on his way with a few extra friends. Humoring this woman in her last few moments alive was being nice. Oh, wouldn’t the Doctor be proud.

“Can’t I just have an hour to myself? It’s been a hell of a day,” Dezi bemoaned while making sure to look at Tish. For the girl’s credit, she did look ashamed at not fulfilling _one task._

But Vivien Rock looked far from ashamed, “Oh, strike while the iron’s hot, that’s what I say, Daniella. I can call you Daniella, can’t I? Now, everyone’s talking about Harold Saxon, but I thought ‘What about the sister?’ All I need is twenty minutes.”

Never mind waiting for her brother, she was going to tear Vivien Rock apart if the woman didn’t leave her alone…“I would rather wait,” she said with a brief glance to the connecting door that her brother would come through soon.

“The headline’s waiting to print: _The Power Behind the Throne,”_ Vivien teased, her hands spreading out as she spoke.

_‘Humor her, she doesn’t exist.’_

Closing her eyes, she snapped them open to appear interested, “Really?”

“Practically Britain’s First Lady,” Vivien pointed out, remaining completely oblivious to the way Dezi’s smile tightened at the near insult.

“Gosh,” Dezi tried to gasp, but to her it fell flat.

Vivien, though, Vivien was eating her ‘intrigue’ up, “Front page.”

As if she hadn’t had so many front page write ups, the idea that _that_ would make her agree nearly made Dezi snort. It took so much effort for her to smile and say, “Oh, well, I suppose…Oh, go on then.  Twenty minutes.”

Vivien’s smile grew to outlandish proportions, “Excellent!  Thank you!” Clapping her hands together, she turned to Tish and held out her coat, “Oh, oh, what was it?  Oh, Tish.  Now you can leave us alone.”

“No, but I’m supposed to sit in,” Tish protested.

“No, no. It’s—it’s only a profile piece. You know, hair and clothes and nonsense. There’s a good girl. Out you go. That’s it,” with Tish now slightly pushed out of the room, Vivien closed the doors behind the girl and then turned to Dezi; her smile fell off her face and she stared at the Time Lady imploringly, “Ms. Saxon, I have reason to believe…that you’re in very great danger. All of us, in fact. Not just the country, but the whole world.”

Dezi couldn’t help but scoff, not at what Vivien was suggesting because it was completely right, but at the woman’s belief that Daniella Saxon would be harmed by her brother. As if the Master would _ever_ lay a hand on her. Yell at her, yes, but they were siblings and fighting was expected.

Vivien took her scoff to be at her suggestion and she shook her head rapidly, “I beg of you, hear me out.”

“Harry would never hurt me,” Dezi informed the woman with a frown.

“Your brother is not who he says he is. I’m sorry, but it’s all a lie. Everything’s a lie.”

* * *

The Doctor watched the commercial that automatically started when a person got onto Saxon’s website. All the people all cheered the same thing, evidently the Master’s campaign slogan, “Vote Saxon.” It was enough to make the Doctor want to hurl.

Jack paused the video and started to list off Harold Saxon’s achievements, “Former Minister of Defense. First came to prominence when he shot down the Racnoss on Christmas Eve,” he paused to give the Doctor a nod, “Nice work, by the way.”

“Oh, thanks,” the Doctor replied; he hadn’t expected Jack to know what he was doing on Christmas Eve, but then again the man must have been keeping tabs on him for a very long time.

“He goes back years. He’s famous. Everyone knows his story. Look. Cambridge University, Rugby blue, won the Athletics thing, wrote a novel, went into business, everything. He’s got a whole life,” Martha elaborated. “His sister is just as popular. Went to Cambridge a few classes behind him, sings at a church choir every Sunday, she even got pretty far on the _Great British Bake Off,_ made some sort of dough that Paul Hollywood _loved.”_

“Must have used a recipe from Gallifrey,” the Doctor muttered; Gallifreyan baking was an art few mastered, but he wasn’t surprised Dezi knew how to do it. Everyone had called her mad, yes, but she was also a genius only paralleled by her brother.

* * *

“All of it. The school days, his degree, even his mother and father. It’s all invented,” Vivien said. She held up a picture of the Master; Dezi recognized it instantly as the one from their website about his Cambridge time, “Look, Harold Saxon never went to Cambridge. There was no Harold Saxon. The thing is, it’s obvious. The forgery is screaming out and yet no one can see it. It’s as if he’s mesmerized the entire world.”

“If you’re just going to call my brother a liar then you should go,” Dezi snapped.

“18 months ago he became real. This is his first, honest-to-God appearance, just after the downfall of Harriet Jones.  And at the exact same time, they launched the Archangel Network,” Vivien explained in a very slow voice.

“Mrs. Rock, please stop it,” Dezi replied; she tried her best to appear frightened or even just upset, but it was hard for her to act in the completely opposite emotion. This woman was _annoying_ at the very least and now she had proven she _needed_ to die. Dezi was thrilled!

“Even now they say that the— the Cabinet has gone into seclusion. I mean, what does that mean, ‘seclusion?’”

“How should I know?”

Vivien conceded at that, choosing to not press the issue to instead lean forwards in her chair as if to create some type of bond between them. “But I’ve got plenty of research on you. Yes, good family – you really look so much like your grandmother it’s uncanny – very bright and _kind,_ ” getting up from her chair, the woman sat down next to Dezi and looked her uncomfortably in the eyes. “And that’s why I’m asking you, Daniella. I’m begging you. If you have seen anything, heard anything, even the slightest thing that would give you cause to doubt him…”

_‘I’m here…scare her.’_

Dezi took Vivien’s hand and clasped her own over it, “I think…” she started in a dreamy voice.

“Yes?” Vivien pressed, not even twitching when the door opened.

“I think…you’re an idiot.”

“What?” Vivien made to pull her hand away, but Dezi squeezed her own, trapping her in her grip. “Daniella? What are you doing?!”

“He’s my brother, you sniveling old _hag,”_ Dezi snapped, “For you to even _think_ he would harm me is an insult on our family! By the laws of Gallifrey, such a grievant insult only has one punishment…”

“Death,” the Master finished. The two both smirked when the blood ran from Vivien’s face as she her eyes flickered widely between the siblings.

Dezi let go of the woman’s hand and wiped it on her dress with a disgusted sneer. “You took your time,” she admonished her brother.

“I had to make sure the Cabinet Room was locked up,” her brother replied with a roll of his eyes, “You can handle yourself with a human reporter.”

Vivien seemed to regain a bit of herself, because she backed up into the couch. “Is this some kind of joke?” she asked.

“No,” the Master answered, “Because you’re absolutely right. Harold Saxon doesn’t exist, though you missed Daniella being fake as well.”

Vivien moved forwards from the back of the couch, seeming like she _wanted_ to look brave but was too frightened to try and _actually_ look brave. “Then tell me…who are you two?” she asked in a surprisingly level voice.

“I’m the Master and she is Dezi,” the Master answered. Smoothly, he held out his hands and gave Vivien a chilling look, “These are my friends,” At the cue, four small, metal spheres appeared and started to bob around the Master.

“I’m sorry?”

“Can’t you hear it?” the Master asked; his gaze didn’t move when Galaxy got up and placed her hand on his arm in a show of support and, though Vivien would never realize this, love. It would seem impossible for someone to love the Master or for the ‘Mad Woman of Gallifrey’ to love someone, but she did, and it hurt to hear him talk about the drums; a noise he had heard constantly in his head since he was eight. She had connected with him once and had heard it herself; they were horrible.

“What do you mean?”

“The drumbeat. The drums coming closer and closer.”

The spheres set spikes out of their bottom half and started towards Vivien eagerly. As they closed in on the helpless woman, Dezi took out a phone and videoed just the first bit of their attack. Then, the siblings fled as the woman started to scream, making sure to close the door firmly behind them while they stood in the hallway.

“I think she created a paradox for us.”

“Hmm?” the Master hummed; his eyes were intently on the door as if he could stare though it and see Vivien’s death inside of it.

Rolling her eyes, Dezi leaned against the wall and started to type her message to Martha Jones, _“Become familiar with this type of death.”_ She did not wait for her brother to okay and instead pressed the send button, smiling when the message read as received and then read.


	5. The Sound of Drums Pt. 2: Run

The scream shocked both the Doctor and Jack. The Doctor had flinched violently, jumping from the couch arm to run over to Martha; in the kitchen, Jack had dropped the cup of tea he had just poured and barked out a curse that would have made the Doctor give him a disapproving look had he not been attending to his companion.

She was staring at her phone; her mouth was open and an unsettling pallor had set in. When the Doctor took her phone, Martha didn’t even protest. Turning his back so she couldn’t accidentally see it, the Time Lord looked down at the video and the text underneath it.

_“Become familiar with this type of death.”_

Reading it over, it sounded like a threat to the Doctor; a threat that was made on his companion. The Doctor was okay with his companions getting in trouble, that was just part of the job as far as he was concerned, but a threat of death from someone was something he was decidedly not okay with.

Biting back the urge to smash the phone, the Doctor pressed play on the video above of the text; he watched it without flinching at the screams from the woman as she was torn apart by the hovering balls. When it was over, he closed the phone and turned to Martha. The girl was clearly in some state of shock which meant _he_ would take care of her.

He led her over to the couch and sat her down, rubbing her back in soothing circles as he went. He glanced up at Jack to motion to the tea he had brewed. The other man had nodded, watching the two interact on the couch as he went.

When she had been coxed to sip some tea, Martha hoarsely whispered out, “What were those?”

“I don’t know,” the Doctor admitted; one of his hands reached up to scratch the back of his neck as he spoke, “I think Dezi or the Master might have made them.”

“Or bought them from somewhere,” Jack suggested from the arm of the couch where he was perked, “He has the TARDIS, he can go anywhere.”

The Doctor shook his head, “When he was stealing the TARDIS, the only thing I could do was fuse the coordinates. I locked them permanently. He can only travel between the year 100 trillion and the last place the TARDIS landed. Which is right here, right now.”

“How much leeway?”

“Well…18 months, tops. The most he could have been here is 18 months,” the Doctor answered, but then he frowned as he looked over at Martha’s laptop, “So how has he managed all this? The Master was always sort of…hypnotic but this is on a massive scale.”

Martha swallowed hard, “I was gonna vote for him,” she said disgustedly and with a shake of her head at the idea.

The Doctor felt his eyebrows raise, “Really?”

“It was before I met you,” Martha defended – her defense, the Doctor realized with a frown, sounded weak and uncertain and false. He looked at her carefully, watching as her fingers started to tap on her leg, creating a nonsense pattern the way humans do when they fidget, “And I liked him.”

“Me too,” Jack added.

When the Doctor looked over at the man, he noticed that he too was fidgeting in the same way; the man’s hands were tapping out nonsense, a pattern completely different to Martha’s. The Doctor frowned and looked down at his own hands, half expecting them to be moving the same way. They weren’t, of course, and the Doctor had known that, but he couldn’t help but feel a certain level of relief.

He paused, realizing that Martha and the Jack had not given any information about Harold Saxon other than they _liked_ him. What did that even mean?

“Why do you say that?  What was his policy?  What did he stand for?”

When Martha replied, her voice had taken on a dreamy tone to it, “I dunno.  He always sounded…good,” she shrugged, but the Doctor didn’t see it in favor of staring at her fingers shifting from its nonsense pattern to four beats, one after the other, “Like you could trust him. Just nice. He spoke about…I can’t really remember, but it was good. Just the sound of his voice.”

“What’s that?” the Doctor asked, motioning to her hands.

Martha jerked in her seat and her fingers started to slow in their tapping, “What?”

“That! That tapping, that rhythm! What are you doing?”

Martha’s fingers stopped tapping, “I dunno. It’s nothing. It’s j—  I dunno!”

Before the Doctor could press her further, a tune played from Martha’s laptop. Rushing to his feet, he sprinted over to look at the screen and, without hesitation, turned on the TV, “Our lord and master is speaking to his kingdom.”

* * *

Inside the Cabinet Room, Dezi stood to the side and watched as her brother sat in a seat in front of an ornate fireplace; he had a solemn expression on his face, though to Dezi it looked like he was trying not laugh while he delivered his message.

“Britain, Britain, Britain.  What extraordinary times we’ve had. Just a few years ago, this world was so small. And then they came, out of the unknown, falling from the skies.

They had set up security footage to play before he spoke, showing clips of different aliens falling, marching, flying, and killing, “You’ve seen it happen—Big Ben destroyed, a spaceship over London. All those ghosts and metal men. The Christmas star that came to kill. Time and time again the government told you nothing. Well not me. Not Harold Saxon. Because my purpose here today is to tell you this—citizens of Great Britain…I have been contacted. A message, for humanity, from beyond the stars.”

When her brother nodded over at her, Dezi pulled the video they had taken of one of the spheres, the one with a sweet female voice, and pressed play. They couldn’t hear it, but they didn’t need to; she and her brother had written the script and filmed it themselves. To the average viewer, the idea of an alien called the Toclafane would be stunning in a _good_ way, but to the Doctor…

Dezi gave her brother a nod when the footage ended; he gave the camera a charming smile, “Ooh, sweet. And this species has identified itself. They’re called the Toclafane. And tomorrow morning they will appear. Not in secret, but to all of you. Diplomatic relations with a new species will begin. Tomorrow, we take our place in the universe. Every man, woman and child. Every teacher and chemist and lorry driver and farmer. And every…oh, I don’t know…medical student?”

While the feed cut to black, Dezi headed out and started to rapidly walk off. She could give her congratulations to her brother later; she had a job to do.

* * *

The Doctor, Martha, and Jack stood on the street outside of Martha’s flat; the trio were breathing hard as they looked at the aftermath of the explosion they had fled. The Doctor knew the Master would toy with him; he would set up things that would appear meaningless to anyone but him, but he hadn’t expected this level of puzzle pieces. Of course, the Doctor knew why the Master’s game had changed; he had a new helper in the form of Dezi.

Still holding Martha’s laptop, he turned to his companion to ask how tight security was in her flat, he hadn’t had the time to look, but he paused, his question just starting to form on his lips. She was _on her phone!_

“What are you doing?”

“He knows about me. What about my family?” Martha asked, her voice rising with a note of hysteria.

“Don’t tell them anything!”

“I’ll do what I like!” Martha snapped back. She turned her back to the Doctor, but he could still hear her voice calm when her call connected, “Mum? Oh my God, you’re there.”

The Doctor tilted his head to the side, not even bothering to hide listening to Martha’s conversation. He could faintly hear her mother saying something that Martha replied to anxiously, “I’m fine. I’m fine. Mum, has there been anyone asking about me?”

* * *

In Francine Jones’ home, Dezi was waiting for the Doctor, Martha, and Jack to arrive; Martha was stupid when it came to her family, Tish’s ranting about how she either put in max or no energy was proof. It didn’t take a genius to figure out that Martha would come as soon as she heard something off in Francine’s story, and if she demanded to speak with her father, which she would, Dezi knew Clive would break. He had been deeply uncomfortable when they had approached him and had expressed multiple times that he was _not_ okay with the current plan – that had led to several screaming arguments.

“No, but it’s your father.  We’ve been talking and we thought we might give it another go,” Francine said; right on cue.

From the recorder set up to the woman’s phone, Dezi could hear Martha’s reply as if _she_ was on the phone with her, _“Don’t be so daft!  Since when?”_

Francine looked over at Dezi biting her lip but nodding when the Time Lady motioned for her to go on, “Just come ‘round.  Come to the house, we can celebrate.”

_“You said you’d never get back with him in a million years,”_ Martha reminded; her voice was halting as she spoke.

Dezi motioned at Clive and Francine made a face but nodded, “Ask him yourself.”

Clive, phone in hand, spoke into it a monotone that nearly made Dezi giggle at the complete lack of even trying to convince Martha, but the glower on Francine’s face made her try to school her own to something that looked upset, “Martha, it’s me.”

_“Dad?  What are you doing there?”_

“Like your mother said, come ‘round.  We can explain everything,” Clive responded; Dezi did not miss him refusing to answer his daughter’s question, he had, after all, warned that he would not lie to Martha at all – yet another argument had come from that statement; something about how he wouldn’t lie to _Martha,_ but he would to his own _wife._

There was a very long pause from Martha before she asked the question Dezi had been waiting for her to ask, _“Dad? Just say yes or now. Is there someone else there?”_

While Francine frantically shook her head at her ex-husband, Dezi watched Clive’s face. She could see the feelings flick across them, but he settled on one emotion Dezi had known he would: determination. If Clive hadn’t been human, Dezi might have even said she respected him.

“Yes!  Just run!” Clive shouted. He jumped to his feet, phone still in hand, and started to run to the door while Francine screamed after him and the guards Dezi had brought along went after him. While this was going on, Clive continued to yell to his daughter, “Listen to me!  Just run!” he started to struggle, grunting loudly as he was grabbed by the two guards, “It’s the Saxons!”

“We’re trying to help her!  Martha, don’t listen to him!” Francine screamed.

As the phone disconnected, Clive and Francine continued to yell at each other even as Clive was dragged from the house. Rolling her eyes, Dezi walked after them; someone would need to watch the roads for Martha and the two men.

Clive, when he had been taken outside, had stopped screaming at his ex and instead focused his full energy on trying to escape the guards, “Get off!” When the neighbors came out to watch, as Dezi had expected, Clive shouted at them as well, “It’s your fault, all of you!  You voted Saxon!  You did this!”

Shaking her head, Dezi connected to her brother, _‘We’re taking all of them in as discussed.’_

_‘Clive broke?’_

_‘Almost immediately.’_

Turning to the guards, Dezi jerked her head to Francine Jones; the woman didn’t notice any action until one of the men grabbed her arm with a tight grip. Her eyes bugging, she glared at Dezi, “But I was helping you!”

“We were using you,” Dezi corrected lightly as the woman was dragged into the waiting van Clive was already being pressed into, “Anyone who’s willing to trick their daughter like you were is a liability.”

Francine gaped at her, “I was helping you!” she repeated, “Get off me!” She added to the guards even as she was pressed into the van next to Clive.

The squealing of car tires made Dezi smile. She turned to see Martha’s blue car skidding to a stop; Martha was sitting in the driver seat with a horrified expression on her face; behind her, Jack had leaned forwards, and next to him…the Doctor had the oddest expression on his face. It wasn’t angry, it wasn’t scared, it was… _pity?_

Even as Francine screamed for her daughter to leave, Dezi grabbed one of the guns from the guards and held it up; following her lead, the guards did the same. “Fire!” she cried out, and the bullets started to hit Martha’s car while it drove off. Dezi growled when saw one of her own shots breaking Martha’s rear window but doing no damage.

Turning to the Jones, she gave them a false smile they could see through, “Enjoy you’re stay,” she said in a falsely pleasant voice, “Because I’ll enjoy getting to use you against your daughter.”

As Clive started to shout at her and Francine screamed, Dezi nodded to one of the guards to take the family out.

_‘Did they get the message?’_

_‘No,’_ the Master replied, _‘They still think they can hide from us.’_

_‘If I connect with him for just a few minutes…’_

_‘No!’_

_‘There’s no need to yell Kosch.’_

Dezi heard the Master huff before he responded, _‘Just don’t do it.’_

* * *

The Doctor was growing very uncomfortable in his seat next to Martha; she had just seen her parents get forcibly taken by Dezi and she was, understandably, upset. Very upset.

“The only place we can go…planet Earth.  Great,” she snapped as she hopped up on a curb with one of her tires.

“Careful!” the Doctor warned; he winced at the glare she sent him and, without meaning to, sank into his seat.

Jack, who was sitting in the back seat, leaned forwards; he placed his hands on both seats and spoke to Martha in a stern, urgent voice, “Now, Martha, listen to me. Do as I say. We’ve gotta ditch this car. Pull over,” when Martha didn’t do as he ordered, he snapped, “Right now!”

Automatically, Martha parked her car and the trio exited it with the Doctor in the lead. He looked around the area, taking in all the cameras and people around them; Dezi or the Master could easily blend in, especially if the Master had taken to costuming in this regeneration as well. He had been scary at it in the past.

He looked over at Jack and then at Martha, frowning when he saw the black woman, once again, on the phone, “Martha, come on!” he called to her.

She ignored him, choosing to instead speak into her phone to warn her brother, Leo, about going to someone’s house; the Doctor was only half-listening, trying to give her some resemblance of privacy, but then he heard Martha yell into her phone, “Let them go, Saxon,” and he was turning and heading towards her even as she continued to yell at the other Time Lord.

He took her phone, though there was no protest from her, and held it to his ear, “I’m here.”

_“Doctor,”_ the Master replied in a serious voice.

“Master,” the Doctor greeted in return; it was only customary, after all. Even though Gallifrey no longer existed because of _his_ actions, he would refuse to let the old customs die off – well, some of the old customs, anyways.

_“And Dezi,”_ Dezi chimed in lightly, _“I appreciate the old customs; very bold coming from an only child.”_

The Doctor gritted his teeth at the slight but choose to not push on it; it was true, he was an only child, and it was true that an only child following ancient customs was a bold thing, but the Doctor had never been one to be anything _but_ bold. So, he simply greeted her the same way, “Dezi.”

_“Don’t worry, I promised Kosch that I wouldn’t comment during this; I’m the notetaker.”_

The Doctor nodded automatically; having a notetaker during a confrontation was yet another Gallifreyan tradition, and it was rather ironic that Dezi would be fulfilling that position considering who it _usually_ was filled by. The Time Lord swallowed hard, suddenly unsure of what to say; what did anyone say to their best friend who was trying to kill him and everyone on his favorite planet?

“So, Master,” he started, only to have the Master interrupt him.

_“I like it when you use my name.”_

“You chose it,” the Doctor pointed out, “Psychiatrists field day.”

_“As you chose yours. The man who makes people better. How sanctimonious is that?”_

The Doctor pretended as if he hadn’t heard the scoffs from the Master or Dezi after his rhetorical question, “So…Prime Minister.”

_“I know. It’s good, isn’t it?”_

The Doctor winced at the question; when the Master got that excited tone it was hard to not remember the child he had been best friends with, the one who wanted his peers to praise him, not fear him. But the thought of the metal spheres murdering the woman made the Doctor’s childhood memories fade, “Who are those creatures? ‘Cause there’s no such thing as the Toclafane. It’s just a made-up name like the Bogeyman.”

_“Do you remember all those fairy tales about the Toclafane when we were kids? Back home. Where is it, Doctor?”_ the Master paused before he added, _“Dezi can’t speak to anymore but you and me; what does that mean, Doctor?”_

“Gone,” the Doctor answered in a sudden hoarse voice.

_“How can Gallifrey be gone?”_ the Master pushed, his voice sounded weaker than before, more raw and emotional.

“It burnt.”

_“And the Time Lords?”_

“Dead. And the Daleks…more or less,” he finished in a mutter, “What happened to the two of you?”

_“Dezi convinced the Time Lords to resurrect me; she got them to believe that I’d be the perfect warrior for the Time War. We were there when the Dalek Emperor took control of the Cruciform. We saw it. I took Dezi and we ran. We ran so far. Made ourselves human so they would never find us because…I was so scared of what would happen to Dezi if she was close to that war when it ended.”_

“I know,” the Doctor admitted; he had looked for Dezi on the last day of Gallifrey, knowing it was the least he could do before he blew the planet up. But he hadn’t been able to find her and he had always wondered if she had been there, if she had heard the screams of their people in her head. He had regretted not being able to find her; until now, at least.

_“All of them? But now you, which must mean…”_

“I was the only one who could end it. And I tried. I did. I tried everything,” the Doctor tried to explain and to convey his eternal remorse for the actions that led to Gallifrey burning in the sky while he lived.

_“What did it feel like, though? Two almighty civilizations burning. Oh, tell me, how did it feel?”_

“Stop it!” the Doctor snapped; he hated that the Master could ever derive some sort of sick pleasure at their people’s death. That wasn’t the friend he had grown up with.

_“You must have felt like God,”_ the Master pressed with childish glee.

“I’ve been alone ever since,” the Doctor said in an effort to change the subject, “But not anymore. Don’t you see, all we’ve got is the three of us.”

_“We don’t do incest,”_ Dezi added in suddenly; her voice sounded like she was trying to hold back a laugh.

“You could both stop this right now,” the Doctor pushed, “We could leave this planet. We could fight across the constellations if that’s what you want. But not on Earth.”

_“Too late.”_

“Why do you say that?”

_“The drumming,”_ the Master said, and even as he spoke the Doctor could hear him drumming his own fingers on a table, _“Dezi’s voices stopped so I thought it would stop, but it never does. Never ever stops. Inside my head, the drumming Doctor. The constant drumming.”_

“I could help,” the Doctor offered, pleaded, really, “Please, let me help.”

_“It’s everywhere,”_ the Master continued, _“Listen, listen, listen,”_ so the Doctor listened. He could hear the tapping on the table, growing louder as the Master started to repeat, _“Here come the drums. Here come the drums.”_

For a wild moment, the Doctor thought that he _too_ was hearing the drums, but then his eyes spotted a homeless man taping out the same rhythm on his legs, and a man was tapping it out on his mug, and another man was clapping it out.

Turning his back on them, the Doctor spoke urgently into the phone, “What have you done?  Tell me how you’ve done this.  What are those creatures?  Tell me!”

_“Oh, you’re on TV,”_ Dezi responded.

“Stop it!” the Doctor snapped, “Answer me!”

_“No, really. You’re on the telly! You and your little band, which by the way, is ticking every demographic box. So, congratulations on that. Look, there you are! Ha!”_

Turning slowly, the Doctor looked at the TV shop in front of him; on each and every TV was the same newscast showing his and Martha’s and Jack’s face while the BBC newscaster reported, _“…They are known to be armed and extremely dangerous.”_

_“You’re public enemies number one, two, and three,”_ the Master informed him gleefully.

_“Tell dear Captain Jack that I’ve personally sent his little gang off on a wild goose chase to the Himalayas, so he won’t be getting much help from them anytime soon. I heard it’s so cold there it can kill!”_

_“Now, go on, off you go. Why not start by turning to the right?”_

The Doctor turned slowly; his eyes hit the camera pointed at them immediately, “He can see us,” he reported bitterly before he destroyed it with his sonic screwdriver. If the Master and Dezi wanted them to be public enemies, then he would act like one.

_“Ooh, you actually did it,”_ Dezi cheered into the phone, _“You should start running before someone notices. Go on, run!”_

“He’s got control of everything,” the Doctor informed his group, ignoring Dezi’s advice for the moment.

Martha crossed her arms defensively, “What do we do?”

“We’ve got nowhere to go,” Jack added.

“Doctor, what do we do?”

_“Run for your life, Doctor!”_

“We run.”

As the trio ran through a shopping arcade, for a brief moment the Doctor thought he heard Dezi’s voice shout through his head to run, but he shook it off; it was only a phantom connection.

* * *

Dezi watched with narrowed eyes as the metal ball flew out of the room her brother was in. She didn’t like the balls as much as she had let her brother believe; they creeped her out, but then again, they would creep out anyone who knew what they truly were.

She walked into the room and looked at her brother who was engrossed in some child TV show with bright colors and characters that made baby noises, “They’re in a warehouse,” she reported.

“Will they be there?” the Master asked, though he didn’t look up from the screen as he spoke.

“Of course,” Dezi swallowed hard and then added in a softer voice, “If you let me connect with him them we’d be able to figure out what the Doctor is thinking.”

“He’ll notice you.”

“He’ll notice me if I _want_ him to notice me,” Dezi corrected.

The Master shook his head, “You’ll have plenty of time to connect to him after 8:00 tomorrow,” he reminded her, “Until then just put it out of that pretty little head of yours. We have a lot to do before Mr. President gets here.”

* * *

In an abandoned warehouse, the Doctor found himself doing the two things he _hated_ to do; get asked questions he didn’t want to answer and talk about his past. Martha and Jack had sprung the questions on them when they had all sat down in foldout chairs to eat the crisps Martha had managed to sneak out and get.

“So, Doctor, who are they?” Jack asked in a would-be casual voice if his gaze hadn’t been so penetrating, “How come the ancient society of Time Lords created two psychopaths?”

“And what are they to you? Like colleagues…”

“Friends, at first, or at least he was; she was just his kid sister who tagged along with us,” the Doctor answered.

“I thought you were gonna say they’re your secret siblings or something,” Martha admitted with a shrug.

The Doctor and Jack stared at her, and Martha wilted under their gaze. The Doctor shook his head, “You’ve been watching too much TV,” he said reproachingly.

Jack frowned, “But all the legends of Gallifrey made it sound so perfect,” he pointed out.

“Well, perfect to look at, maybe. And it was, it was beautiful,” the Doctor’s smile grew wistful as he leaned back in his chair, “They used to call it the Shining World of the Seven Systems. And on the Continent of Wild Endeavour, in the Mountains of Solace and Solitude, there stood the Citadel of the Time Lords…The oldest and most mighty race in the universe…looking down on the galaxies below…sworn never to interfere…only to watch…”

“Children of Gallifrey, taken from their families at the age of eight to enter the Academy. And some say that’s when it all began, for the Master at least. When he was a child… that’s when the Master saw eternity. As a novice, he was taken for initiation, it’s a gap in the fabric of reality through which could be seen the whole of the vortex. You stand there, eight years old…staring at the raw power of time and space, just a child.  Some would be inspired…some would run away…and some would go mad.”

“Dezi though, Dezi was always mad, or at least that’s what they all said. She never was though, at least not like her brother was. She’s a natural psychic, so are most Time Lords but she’s…she’s something else. She can connect to anyone, form mental links with everyone. When she was a kid she couldn’t control it; she was connected to everyone at once and could hear it in her head. The High Council took her for a few years and when she came back she could control it; just in time for her eighth birthday.”

“Which one was she?” Jack asked.

“That was a very popular question about her,” the Doctor said with a shrug, “No one ever knew whether she was mad or inspired.”

“Which one were you?” Martha asked suddenly.

“Oh, the ones that ran away. I never stopped,” he said easily. It wasn’t like they knew the shame that had brought him, though that shame was only an addition to being an only child on Gallifrey.


	6. The Sound of Drums Pt. 3: Good to be Master:

The Master and Dezi stood on the tarmac to greet the America President Winters; from what they had found on him he was hard on all policies no matter their party, and he also felt, quite strongly, that the United States should be the default leader when it came anything, but that had been something Dezi and the Master were banking for. The only nation that could conceivably respond with effective violence to the Master’s takeover was America, which meant they had to remove their leader publicity and boldly.

Just as the man started to walk towards the siblings, Dezi stiffened beside her brother, “They’re here,” she reported in a barely audible whisper.

In response, her brother barely inclined his head; his eyes remained steadfast on the President. When the man was right in front of him, the Master saluted jovially, “Mr. President, sir!”

“Mr. Saxon,” President Winters greeted with far less gusto and amusement, “The British army will stand down. From now on, UNIT has control of this operation.”

“You make it sound like an invasion,” the Master accused with an exaggerated frown.

“First contact policy was decided by the Security Council in 1968,” President Winters reminded him, “And you’ve just gone and ignored it.”

“Well, you know what it’s like,” the Master said with a shrug, “New job, all that paperwork. I think it’s down the back of the settee. I did have a quick look. I found a pen, a sweet, a bus ticket, and uh…have you met my sister?”

“Hello,” Dezi greeted with a small smile as she became Daniella Saxon once again, “I’m so sorry we have to meet under such circumstances, but I just want to say that I followed your campaign extensively and I was very impressed by what I saw.”

President Winters gave her a gruff grin, “Thank you for that,” he said, but then he turned right back to Dezi’s brother, “Mr. Saxon, I’m not sure what your game is but there are provisions at the United Nations to have you removed from office unless you are very, very careful. Is that understood?” In response, the Master mimed as if he was zipping his lips up, “Are you taking this seriously?” The Master nodded, but President Winters sighed and shook his head, “To business.  We’ve accessed your files on these…Toclafane.”

_‘They’re right behind us,’_ Dezi warned; she could feel the hairs on the back of her neck rising. She couldn’t help but twitch and raise her hand to scratch at them. She wanted desperately to turn around and to stare at the Doctor, or better yet, she wanted to connect to him. But instead, she had to listen to her brother’s conversation with the President, which was thankfully nearly over.

“It still will be televised, though, won’t it? Because I promised, and the whole world is watching,” the Master reminded with a flash of too many teeth to be a comfortable smile.

“Since it’s too late to pull out, the world will be watching. Me,” President Winters stated. He turned on his heel and walked to a waiting car, their visit now over.

Dezi shook her head, “The last President of America; shame they had to elect an idiot.”

The Master snorted, “Did you expect less? Come on, we have a private plane ready and waiting. We should reach the _Valiant_ within the hour.”

Dezi huffed, “And miss all the fun? Why don’t you get on first; anyone could just take you out.”

“As if I would let them. I’d just regenerate.”

Dezi rolled her eyes, “I doubt you’d regenerate from your head blasted off.”

“As riveting as this conversation is,” the Master started with deep sarcasm in his voice, “Our honored guests have arrived.”

“Oh joy,” Dezi sighed as she saw the black car holding the Jones family drive up. Even though it was all for a plan, spending time with a bunch of angry humans for _any_ amount really wasn’t on Dezi’s top ten list for a good time. Still, she walked to their transport car, far less enthusiastic as her brother’s gleeful running, and stood to the side of it just in range for them to see.

“Play nice and we’ll have no reason to kill you,” she informed them as she unlocked the car, “Or don’t. We only need one.”

“All will be revealed!” the Master cut in.

“That too,” Dezi grumbled.

She stepped back as the guards came and escorted each of the family, Francine, Clive, and Tish, into a car and then driven away. Clive had struggled and so had Francine, but a couple of rough shoves made them settle down enough to be put into the car.

“We should probably go,” Dezi reminded her brother as he watched the car drive off. The Master held up one finger, a suddenly serious expression on his face. Slowly, he turned to look at the Doctor’s group; Dezi did the same. The siblings caught the other man’s eye, watching as he kept his companions attention away from them just long enough to mouth something at them.

“It’s not too late,” Dezi read out softly, and then shook her head, “It was always too late,” she scoffed.

Humming in agreement, the Master turned around and took her hand, “We should go.”

Turning as well, Dezi nodded, “Of course. _Valiant_ is waiting.”

As the two siblings boarded and then sat down on the private plane, Dezi felt something break in her mind, as if a connection had been severed. She had felt the same thing before when she and the Master had left their Doctor behind, but that had been planned; this was unexpected and enough of a shock to make her cry out.

“What?” the Master asked with wide eyes. When she didn’t respond promptly, he asked again, “Dezi, what happened?”

“He moved in time,” Dezi gasped, “He went forwards.”

The Master shook his head, “That’s impossible.”

“Not if Captain Jack had some sort of technology to do it. Remember what Torchwood Three said when they were questioned? ‘Jack’s not from here,’” Wincing, Dezi started to feel _angry,_ “If you had only let me connect to him this wouldn’t have happened.”

The Master scowled at her as all brotherly concern vanished from his face, “You agreed to follow my plan, _little sister,_ and we both know why that is, don’t we?” When no answer came from the still glaring Dezi, the Master got up and leaned in so he was towering over her, _“Don’t we.”_

“Because I can’t make good plans,” Dezi said slowly, her voice hesitant at the familiar but still cutting words.

“That’s right,” the Master responded softly. He slowly knelt down in front of her and took her hand, “Let me do the planning little sis and all will be fine. Don’t you worry your pretty little head over it.”

Dezi nodded slowly and automatically, “I won’t Kosch,” she vowed as all her anger was forgotten in leu of making her brother happy again, “I won’t.”

Standing up once more, her brother kissed her on the forehead, “Take a nap,” he recommended, “We’re about an hour out.”

Obediently, Dezi slipped into a nice and dreamless sleep, knowing not only that her older brother was watching her, but also that soon all would be well with her brother’s plan once more; the Doctor would never be able to beat them.

* * *

Dezi felt when the Doctor’s acceleration caught up with them. Just as suddenly as it had disappeared the night before, it appeared about fifteen minutes before the broadcast.

_‘They’re here,’_ she reported to her brother while simultaneously giving a young blonde woman a smile and a soft thank you for being there.

_‘I know; he set off the silent alarms in the TARDIS corridor.’_

_‘Him and that machine,’_ Dezi said scornfully. TARDIS were not sentient or alive, though the Doctor liked to think the opposite. An entire group of Time Lords shared the same belief, and most of them were low class TARDIS farmers whose job was to toil in the field and pick the few biological parts of a TARDIS. The entire machine was made for protection against the time winds, nothing more and nothing less.

_‘Take a seat,’_ the Master recommended, _‘It’s going to be starting soon.’_

Glancing down at the watch on her wrist, Dezi nodded in agreement to her brother; there were only ten more minutes left and then all would be well and Daniella Saxon would never have to smile and simper her way through public function after public function; she had already planned on burning each and every heel she had ever worn.

Making her way over to her chair, Dezi sat down and idly fiddled with her dress. To anyone who looked her way with concern, Dezi just gave them a charming smile; the human would nod and go back to what they were doing, assuming that Dezi was probably just _nervous_ like everyone else. And if Dezi had been human she probably would have been nervous about today, but she was a Time Lady and Time Ladies do not get nervous about frivolous things like taking over the world in only five minutes.

The chair next to her creaked as the Master sat down, “I’m so glad you were able to make it,” he said in his Harold Saxon voice, “There’s no sibling I would rather experience this with.”

Dezi fought the urge to roll her eyes, that was not what Daniella Saxon would do to her brother, after all. She gave him a large smile, “Oh Harry,” she said in her most breathy voice, “I believe this is history we’re about to experience; I wouldn’t miss it for the world.”

As the clock ticked to just two minutes left, President Winters got everyone’s attention by calling, “Two minutes, everyone!” He backed up so he was standing on a few steps, making him tower over the standing and seated individuals, “According to the treaty, all armed personnel are requested to leave the flight deck immediately. Thank you.”

Reaching into his pocket, the Master held out a bag of Jelly Babies and offered Dezi one, “Ugh,” Dezi said with a shake of her head, “Didn’t the Doctor get obsessed with those.”

The Master shook the bag, “I can see why. They’re delicious!” Dezi could only stare in disgust as the Master shook severely into his hand and ate them at once.

The broadcast started right on time as the clock hit 8:00. Turning so that he took up all the cameras’ frames, President Winters started to speak, “My fellow Americans, patriots, people of the world…I stand before you today as ambassador for humanity, a role I will undertake with utmost solemnity. Perhaps our Toclafane cousins can offer us much, but that is important is not that we gain material benefits, but that we learn to see ourselves anew.”

Sitting up straighter, Dezi touched her brother’s elbow lightly, just ghosting over it. They had discussed her just mentally telling him that the Doctor and co. were there, but the Master had decided that it would be too risky for her to connect to him with the Doctor so close and likely opening himself up as much as possible to give them yet another “last chance.”

“For as long as man has looked to the stars, he has wondered what mysteries they hold. Now we know we are not alone…” President Winters continued in a droning voice that faded into the background. Dezi was hyper aware of the Doctor speaking in a whisper to Jack and Martha; she was just able to pick up some of what they were saying and, honestly, she was not impressed. Did the Doctor really think that a perception filter would work on the Master?

“And I ask you now, I ask of the human race, to join with me in welcoming our friends. I give you the Toclafane,” as President Winters finished his speech, the metal spheres appeared around him right on cue, “My name is Arthur Coleman Winters, President-Elect of the United States of America and designated representative of the United Nations. I welcome you to the planet Earth and its associated moon.”

“You’re not the Master,” one of the spheres announced in a male voice.

“We like the Mr. Master,” a female voice agreed with a bobbing motion that almost resembled a nod.

“We don’t like you,” the last of the spheres, another one with a man’s voice, informed President Winters.

Dezi watched as President Winters’ eyes darted to the Master’s frantically, but her brother gave no sign of helping the man. Looking angry for a brief moment, President Winters managed to say calmly, “I…can be Master, if you so wish. I will accept mastery over you if that is God’s will.”

“Man is stupid,” the last sphere spat.

“Master is our friend,” the first sphere announced.

“Where’s my Master, pretty please?” the female sphere finished.

On cue, Dezi’s brother called out boisterously, “Oh, all right then. It’s me,” he got to his feet and laughed, “Ta-da!” but no one joined in. Shaking his head, the Master started to speak a tad bit more seriously, “Sorry. Sorry, I have this effect. People just get obsessed. Is it the smile? Is it the aftershave? Is it the capacity to laugh at myself? I don’t know. It’s crazy!”

“Saxon, what are you talkin’ about?” President Winters snapped.

“I’m taking control, Uncle Sam,” the Master declared in full seriousness, “Starting with you.”

“Kill him,” Dezi ordered to the spheres from her seat. She saw President Winters’ eyes bug out just before one of the spheres shot him with a laser.

Getting to her feet, she joined her brother as chaos erupted in the room around them. When people tried to leave, the Master’s guards pulled out their weapons and blocked the door forcibly with cries of, “Nobody move! Nobody move!”

Laughing, the Master turned to one of the cameras still running and spoke to it, “Now then, peoples of the Earth, please attend carefully.”

“Guards!” Dezi warned, her eyes spotting the Doctor bare moments before one of the guards spotted him and sent two guards to grab the Time Lord and force him to kneel in front of the siblings.

“We meet at last, Doctor,” the Master said ominously, and then immediately ruined the affect by laughing, “Oh, ho! I love saying that!”

“He practiced it in front of the mirror for days,” Dezi informed him with mock-seriousness.

The Doctor looked in between the siblings and shook his head rapidly, “Stop this! Stop it now!”

“As if a perception filter was going to work on me,” Dezi scoffed as her eyes went to key-string necklace around the man’s neck, “I mean, that’s a bit insulting if you actually thought it would work, and if you didn’t then shouldn’t you have told the girlie and the freak that?” She turned away from him to look at her brother, “Where are they, by the way?”

“Right there,” the Master said cheerfully as he pointed to them. When Jack rushed him, the Master whipped out his laser screwdriver and shot the man with it, making him fall to the floor dead.

“It’s laser,” Dezi informed the Doctor.

“Who’d have sonic?” the Master added with a scoff, “And the good thing is, he’s not dead for long. I get to kill him again! Or at least, Dezi does.”

“Master, Dezi, just calm down. Just look at what the both of you are doing. Just stop. If you could see yourselves…”

Sighing loudly, Dezi pushed the camera away from them while her brother ordered the guards to let the Doctor go. The man fell to the ground and looked up at them, “It’s that sound, the sound in your head. What if I could help?”

“What about me Doctor?” Dezi challenged, “The voices in my head are gone because of you, so how can you fix me too?”

When the Doctor opened his mouth to suggest something, the Master cut him off by placing his hand over the man’s mouth, “Oh, how to shut him up?” He wondered. As if the thought only now occurred to him, the Master smiled comically wide, “I know. Memory lane. Professor Lazarus. Remember him? And his genetic manipulation device?”

“Remember how Tish had that job with him?” Dezi prompted, “And do you really think that job was a coincidence?”

“We’ve been laying traps for you all this time. And if I can concentrate all that Lazarus technology into one little screwdriver…But, ooh, if I only had the Doctor’s biological code. Oh, wait a minute, I do!” As the Master stayed with the Doctor, Dezi walked over to a silver case and opened it to reveal the Doctor’s hand.

“If Lazarus made himself younger, what if I reverse it? Another hundred years?” When Dezi nodded, the Master smirked down at the Doctor and fired the screwdriver at him. As they had expected, the Doctor screamed and convulsed as he was altered to show just a fraction of his real age.

When the Master was finished, all that was left of the once young Time Lord was a withered old man. Dezi watched as he opened his eyes to look at them while Martha crawled to him and helped him to sit up, “Doctor, I’ve got you,” she said.

“Aw, she’s a would-be doctor. But tonight, Martha Jones, we’ve flown ‘em in all the way from prison—” The door slid open as guards led in Tish, Clive, and Francine; their mere appearance made Martha’s face shatter, “Mum,” she croaked out.

“I’m sorry,” Francine sobbed.

Ignoring the moment, the Doctor looked at Dezi, “The Toclafane, who are they? Who are they?”

Dezi looked down at the Doctor and shook her head, “If I told you, then it would break your hearts.”

“Is it time?” one of the spheres asked.

“Is it ready?” another one asked as well.

“Is the machine singing?” the female one added.

The Master looked down at his watch, “Two minutes past,” he stated with a small nod. Grabbing Dezi’s hand, he brought his sister up so that they were standing, side-by-side, on the steps. “So! Earthings. Basically, um, end of the world,” he announced while holding his screwdriver in the air, “Here…come…the drums!”

As _Voodoo Child_ came on, a song Dezi had hated since she heard it but the Master had fallen in love with, the metal spheres swarmed in the sky in preparation to fly.

“How many do you think?” the Master asked Dezi.

“Something that will scare them,” Dezi suggested.

“Six billion,” the Master whistled with a shake of his head; Earth’s population tripled that of Gallifrey at its largest. He switched on the outside speakers and shouted to the spheres, “Down you go, kids!”

And down they went. Dezi knew they would target the big cities like London and New York and Tokyo and start to kill people in the streets or even in their homes, and they would never stop. They would go on killing forever if that was called on them, but that wasn’t what Dezi or the Master wanted. It was much more satisfying to scare them than kill them.

“One-tenth should work,” Dezi said, “A nice decimation.”

“Nice word—decimate,” the Master hummed. He turned the speaker back on and ordered, “Remove one-tenth of the population!”

From the comms. link, frantic, panicked filled reports started to flow in.

_“Valiant, this is Geneva! We’re getting slaughtered down here!”_

_“Help us, for God’s sake! Help us! They’re everywhere!”_

_“This is London, Valiant! This is London calling! What do we do?!”_

_“They’re killing us! The Toclafane are killing us!”_

Dezi and the Master turned when Martha disappeared, and a quick assessment would show that she had taken a device from Jack’s wrist. Dezi sneered and used her brother’s laser screwdriver to kill the immortal man while the Master grabbed the Doctor and brought him to the window to overlook the destruction of Earth.

“And so it came to pass…that the human race fell and the Earth was no more. And I looked down upon my new dominion as master of all and I thought it…good.”


	7. The Last of the Time Lords Pt. 1: The New Normal

Dezi was the one who put out the message to the universe. She supposed some could see it as a kindness to protect the universe from entering into the fray on Earth, but it wasn’t. It was an entirely self-serving act to keep the rest of the universe away from them while she and her brother built up weapons. Keeping the universe away also stopped anyone from knowing what was going on, making their final plan all the more satisfying. Besides, it wasn’t like the message was elaborate or hard to send; all it did was just repeat that Earth is closed, and that traffic should stay away.

She could sometimes hear the message when she passed by the control room, like she was doing then a year later from the successful take-over by Harold and Daniella Saxon. Dezi had heard that the humans had figured out that they weren’t humans, but they still called them by their fake names. Their ears on Earth were helpful with keeping the siblings up to date on the happenings of Earth, but they had failed in one crucial task: Finding Martha Jones. The would-be doctor had disappeared and the only things their ears had heard were rumors.

“She sailed around the world.”

“She’s going to be free us all.”

“She left Earth and is on the moon treating with Martians to come back and stop the Saxons!”

Dezi had laughed at the rumors, but her brother had been furious. Their goal of killing only one-tenth of the population was to scare the people, but Martha Jones’ rumors made them hopeful. He had ranted for ours and had gone as far as to blame Dezi for Martha’s escape. But then, right on Christmas, their ears heard that Martha was in Japan. They attacked, wiping out half of the population before broadcasting their message to the public, “Harbor Martha and be the next Japan.”

They had heard that the people tried to revolt, but _Valiant_ was far above the crowds and untouchable. After their Christmas message, a new normal had settled on Earth, one of acceptance that this would be the daily life for the rest of their lives. They had settled for that because it wasn’t fear but it wasn’t hope either, it was just apathy. And apathetic workers made for less revolts.

And on the _Valiant,_ their own normal had settled in as well. It always started out the same, _“Citizens rejoice. Your lord and master stands on high playing Track 3,”_

Dezi and the Master walked into the conference room, exactly a year after they had taken over Earth. As the music the Master had picked out started to play, the Master gave Dezi a spin as he started to sing along, “I can't decide whether you should live or die…Though you'll probably go to Heaven. Please don't hang your head and cry…”

Letting her go, the Master went to the conference table and sat in one of the chairs to give it a spin, “No wonder why my heart feels dead inside.  It's cold and hard and petrified.  Lock the doors and close the blinds, we're goin' for a ride…” as he sang, Francine, in her maid uniform, poured a cup of tea for him, over sweetened the way he liked. In front of the seat across from him, Francine poured a cup of tea for Dezi as well, containing a minimal amount of cream.

Not going to join her brother, Dezi went over to the Doctor’s tent and connected to him to mentally call, _‘Get out,’_ and the Doctor did as ordered, crawling out and climbing into his wheelchair with a small amount of help from Dezi. As humorous as it would be for him to fall, the Doctor was a Time Lord and deserved a marginal amount of respect. Even if he was an only child.

Getting up from his chair with Dezi’s tea in hand, the Master handed the cup off as he started to push the Doctor around, still singing along, “I can't decide whether you should live or die though you'll probably go to Heaven. Please don't hang your head and cry. No wonder why my heart feels dead inside.  It's cold and hard and petrified. Lock the doors and close the blinds, we're goin' for a ride…”

Dezi followed the two, sipping her tea as they ended up in front of the large window that allowed them to look over their dominion. It had been an idea of the Master’s when he designed the _Valiant;_ he had argued that they would want to be able to look down on Earth occasionally, and Dezi had to admit she had been wrong in her original protest for the window; it was _nice_ to be able to see Earth. Even if she didn’t like the people that didn’t mean she had to dislike the planet.

Their journey over, the Master knelt down so he was eye level with the Doctor, “It's ready to rise, Doctor,” he said, “The new Time Lord Empire,” but the Doctor didn’t answer. Instead his eyes following a few spheres flying past the window on a hunt for dissenters.

Dezi sighed and knelt down next to her brother, “They broke your hearts,” she said softly, “ever since you worked out what they really are. But I know something that will make your hearts pump again: Martha Jones has come back home. Why would she do that?”

“Leave her alone,” the Doctor demanded, or at least he tried to. As a frail old man in a wheelchair, the last thing the Doctor could do was be threatening enough to actually demand anything.

“Not until you told us what you told her,” Dezi replied with a frown, “Remember? When my brother and I took over? What did you tell her?”

“I have one thing to say to the two of you. You both know what that is.”

“Oh, no you don’t!” the Master shouted. He got up and pushed the Doctor until he hit the walls with a huff.

_“Valiant now entering Zone One airspace. Citizens rejoice.”_

“Come on people!” the Master yelled with a clap of his hands, “What are we doing? Launch Day in 24 hours!”

Neither of the siblings noticed as the Doctor signaled Francine with three fingers pressed against his thigh, a signal that traveled through the rest of the ship as a way to plan a rebellion.

* * *

The Master was getting his weekly massage from his latest hapless human female, something beginning with a ‘T.’ Dezi knew exactly why the women would line up to entice him with their looks; the Master required them to live on the _Valiant_ 24/7, taking away a hungry mouth. Of course when the women died, which they always did, a sum of money would be sent to their family that would keep them fed for a year. The women seemed to think that their death was a small price to pay to keep their family fed.

It had been a quiet afternoon, and Dezi was just thinking about practicing Old High Gallifreyan, it was a language that needed constant work to be passable at best, but the PA suddenly screeched, _“Condition red!”_

“What?”

_“Repeat: condition red.”_

Growling, Dezi stormed out of the room and to Jack’s cell. She knew the man would be dead by the time she got there, but that wasn’t the point. There was no way the Jones family was behind this, and since the Doctor had been so apathetic lately the only one who could have planned him was the immortal bastard himself.

It would take him a few minutes to revive, long enough for Dezi to have him chained by his wrists once more. When his eyes popped open and he gasped for breath wildly, Dezi watched silently as he tested the chains.

“Not even long enough to lean against anything,” Jack whistled, “I must have pissed you off.”

“You set off a condition red,” Dezi pointed out, “Did you think death and being uncomfortable was all you would get?”

Jack’s face fell as Dezi whistled and two spheres appeared around her and bobbed ominously. He watched as Dezi came forwards, starting to struggle in his chains as she did so, “What are you gonna do? Torture me? I’ve had worse.”

“I don’t doubt that, Mr. Time Agent,” Dezi said softly, “But pain is pain and this should leave a bit of an impression.

She whistled once again and pointed at Jack, “Have fun,” she said in a sing-song command. As ordered, the spheres came towards him with knives out. Not bothering to stay to watch, Dezi walked out of the cell. She would check back in a few hours when it was time for the broadcast her brother had been planning ever since he had heard that Martha Jones was back.

* * *

Just as she had thought, Dezi wheeled a TV screen into Jack’s cell. At the noise, Jack looked at her in alarm, “Again?” he asked hoarsely.

Dezi didn’t acknowledge his reply, instead trying to figure out how to turn the TV on. She had never liked human technology the way her brother had. She cursed in Gallifreyan under her breath as she clicked the wrong button again.

“It’s the big one,” Jack suggested. When she turned to stare at him, he tried to shrug at her, “You only bring that TV in for a broadcast. I want to know what it is.”

Wanting to come back at him with some sort of retort, Dezi pressed the largest button and winced as the TV turned on as Jack said it would. She could feel his eyes on her, but when she turned to look at him they were firmly fixed on the image of the Saxon logo on the TV. For a moment, Dezi stared at the man, taking in the cut still bleeding on his cheek. She frowned lightly at the sight. The spheres had been much harder on him than she had planned or even wanted. She would have to talk to them again.

She moved so she could see the TV, despite the minimal distance she could feel an itching on her skin from being in such close proximity to the immortal man and she started to rub her arm closet to him. If anything, that just made it worse.

_“My people. Salutations on this, the eve of war,”_ the Master greeted as the footage came on, _“Lovely woman. But I know there's all sorts of whispers down there._ _Stories of a child, walking the Earth, giving you hope.”_

Dezi watched as her brother walked from his seat position to the Doctor, who was sitting in his wheelchair with an exhausted look. She heard Jack suck in a breath beside her and hiss “Why isn’t he fighting back?” For a moment, she thought about setting up a punishment for him, but she supposed that this broadcast would be enough.

_“But I ask you…how much hope has this man got? Say hello, Gandalf. Except he's not that old but he's an alien with a much greater lifespan than you stunted, little apes. What if it showed? What if I suspend your capacity to regenerate? All 900 years of your life, Doctor. What if we could see them?”_

The Master took out his screwdriver and pointed it at the Doctor. As the beam hit him, he fell out of his wheelchair and convulsed on the floor while screaming. His convulsing sped up, faster and faster until he was blur and then…gone.

“Where is he?!” Jack cried out, straining the chains to look at the screen.

On the screen, the Master bent down and moved back the Doctor’s clothes, revealing a large, domed head with massive eyes, still the Doctor’s color, blinking at them. Making sure the camera got a long look at the new Doctor, the Master eventually turned to the screen and asked, _“Received and understood, Miss Jones?”_

Next to Dezi, Jack struggle against his chains. Dezi was about to leave him to it when she heard a creaking noise and Jack’s movements became more frantic. She huffed and stepped in front of the man, drawing his attention forcibly, “Relax. He’s still alive.”

“Barely,” Jack spat.

Dezi rolled her eyes, “You’re acting like this isn’t easily reversible. You would rather us force him to regenerate and kill him before he can?”

“Is that how you kill you guys?” Jack asked, a gleam in his eyes that made Dezi take a half-step back before she could stop herself.

“It’s one of the ways,” she admitted.

“I’ll keep that in mind.”

“Careful, that sounds like a threat.”

“Good,” Jack gave Dezi a grin with just too many teeth to be considered friendly, “It is.”

Closing her eyes, Dezi shook her head, “You humans never learn,” she said in a low whisper to herself, “I’ll pretend I didn’t hear that; I don’t think you can stand another round with those Toclafane and I don’t want to lose my favorite toy just yet.”

Turning away from Jack, she started to push the TV out of the room as she walked out. She was surprised when Jack didn’t yell something from behind her, but she supposed that her words had gotten to him – he wouldn’t last very long with the Toclafane again. Perhaps she had even managed to surprise him by ignoring his blatant threat. The last thought made Dezi smirk; toying with her enemies was _fun._ No wonder the Master did it so often.


	8. The Last of the Time Lords Pt. 2: The Future

That night, just after dinner, Dezi and the Master walked into the conference room. Dezi hadn’t even thought to tell her brother about her nerves, he would either laugh at her or be angry and Dezi didn’t like either option. This would the first time she would see the Doctor with his full age exposed to the public. Sure, she had watched the broadcast, but she knew that being in the room with him would be different. Would those huge brown eyes, which had always shown pity, now be filled with hate?

When she saw his head peak out in the birdcage, Dezi swallowed hard and nearly stumbled. His eyes blinked up at her and, for a moment, Dezi started to reach out automatically to connect to him. She could feel a pull to him, recognizing him as not only a Time Lord but a Time Lord in need that she could help.

“Shocking, isn’t it?” the Master asked suddenly, making Dezi jump. He chuckled and gave her arm a squeeze, “I think it’s the eyes.”

Dezi could only nod in response, finding herself struck mute. She supposed it was the eyes; her brother was rarely wrong about such things. Whatever it was about this small Doctor bothered her enough to turn to her brother and say, “Can we revert him?”

“Why would we?” the Master laughed with a shake of his head, “He’s pocket-sized now!”

“When our empire rises,” Dezi started slowly, “I want the three of us to stand as Time Lords together, even if he is in chains.”

The Master frowned, “I’ll think about it,” he said slowly. He turned to the Doctor and gave the man a smirk, “Tomorrow, they launch,” he reminded him, “We’re opening up a rift in the Braccatolian space. They won’t see us coming. Kinda scary.”

“Then stop,” the Doctor croaked out, his voice weak and raspy but present.

“Once the empire is established and there's a new Gallifrey in the heavens, maybe then… it stops. The drumming. The never-ending drumbeat. Ever since I was a child. I looked into the vortex. That's when it chose me. The drumming, the call to war,” the Master frowned as he looked over at Dezi, “She’s heard them too.”

“I thought it was just his heartbeat, but then I realized in all the years I connected to him, or to anyone else, I had never heard their heartbeat,” Dezi elaborated in a soft voice, “As he grew up it just kept getting louder. Doctor…he deserves a rest from those drums. If this is the only way, then so be it.”

“Can't you hear it? Listen, it's there now. Right now. Tell me you can hear it, Doctor. Tell me,” the Master said as he started to tap out the rhythm on the table in front of him…one…two…three…four.

“It’s only you,” the Doctor creaked with a mournful shake of his large head.

“Good,” the Master responded with a look over at Dezi. The Time Lady still remembered how horrified he had been when she had asked about the drums, how he had sobbed and had tried to make her promise to never connect with him again. It had become their first argument because Dezi refused to let her brother content with the drums on his own. As they started to verge on unbearable, Dezi would connect to him to try and soothe him. It seemed to work briefly, but it was still brief. He had never had true relief from them since he was eight years old. Hundreds of years of a horrible pounding in his head.

Didn’t he deserve some rest?

Dezi turned as the door to the conference room opened, a snarl on her lips. They had told the human guards, bewitched by the Master, that they were _not_ to have any visitors. She stopped short, though, when she saw it was one of the spheres coming in to address the Master. It paused in front of him, “Tomorrow, the war. Tomorrow we rise. Never to fall,” it said gleefully.

“You see? I'm doing it for them! You should be grateful! After all, you love them. So very, very much,” the Master said snidely to the Doctor.

“We went back to Utopia,” Dezi started in answer to the Doctor’s never-asked question, “My brother and I as equals, _not_ companion and driver. I thought they would be dead; it was clear when we woke that Utopia was just a signal from an old ship. They wouldn’t last a month. But when we got there all we saw was death.”

“You should have seen it, Doctor,” the Master said with mocking glee. Even he had been disgusted by the sight, at how the creatures their fellow Time Lord loved and protected had fallen, “Furnaces burning. The last of humanity screaming in the dark.”

“They cannibalized themselves and regressed themselves to children to appease a god they had made up as answer for their situation.”

“We made ourselves so pretty,” the sphere said in agreement to Dezi.

“I knew you had to see it Doctor,” Dezi said slowly, her eyes watching the bobbing sphere, “I knew you had to see what the humans were capable of. We’re the only ones left of our race, you said it yourself, yet I knew that you would never turn your back to the humans and to _us_ unless you saw future humans gleefully killing past humans. A paradox.”

“My masterpiece, Doctor. A TARDIS, strong enough to hold the paradox in place, allowing past and future to collide in infinite majesty.”

“But you’re changing history,” the Doctor protested weakly, “Not just Earth, the entire universe.”

“I’m a Time Lord. I have that right,” the Master reminded him. It was true, in a round-a-bout way. The Time Lords had granted themselves the right over all time and space, but they had also disallowed anyone from exercising that right, leading to renegades like the Master and the Doctor and Dezi. If Gallifrey was still in the skies and if they were to go back to it, they would be thrown in jail and likely executed for their crimes.

“But even then,” the Doctor started, “why come all this way just to destroy?”

“We've come backwards in time to build a brand new empire lasting 100 trillion years.”

“Time Lords and humans combined, Doctor. It’s the only way we could think to sway you to our side. Haven’t you always wanted something like this?”

“If not,” the Master said with a shrug, “then you have confirmation that humans _are_ the greatest beasts of them all.”

When the Doctor did not reply to either them, Dezi shook her head, “Good night,” she called to the man as the siblings headed out. Perhaps after they launched the Doctor would see clearly. He had always been too stubborn for his own good. 

Dezi figured it had to do with him being an only child; they only came from exceedingly stupid parents are exceedingly stubborn parents. Gallifrey, before the Doctor or Dezi or the Master had been born, had had a crisis: there weren’t enough children. Troubling statics showed that if something didn’t change then the Time Lord race would die out in a few thousand years, about a generation or two. The solution clear, families had tripled or quadrupled in size. Though the crisis had nearly dissolved by the time the Doctor and the Master had been born, and by the time Dezi was born just fifty years after them the crisis had been declared over, having only child became an insult for everyone apart of the family. Stupidity was not something welcomed in Time Lord society; that was for Gallifreyans.

Just like his parents, the Doctor was stubborn. He would not back down from doing something, even if it went against Time Lord society as a whole. Dezi only hoped that he came to reason soon, she knew that her brother would loose patience with him and kill him.

* * *

Dezi was woken by her brother far too early and far too rapidly for her pleasure. Though she would never admit it, she had shrieked and had fallen off the bed. The Master had laughed at her, a bold and powerful laugh she had not heard since they had landed on Earth. Just like then, he picked her up and spun her around in a hug, all the while laughing.

Setting her down on her feet, Dezi took in her brother’s dark silk robe and messy hair. Half of his face was lined from sleeping on it, and if Dezi peered closer she could see sleep in the corner of his eyes. Time Lords, though they didn’t need as much sleep as humans, still required some to function fully. It was clear that her brother had just woken up.

“What happened?” Dezi asked, her voice slightly raspy from sleep.

“Martha told everything to one Professor Alison Docherty,” the Master said with huge grin, “Including where she’s hiding tonight.”

“We’ll have to reward her; I’ll bring her son over,” Dezi said. She paused and then a smile rivaling her brother’s spread across her face, “Does the Doctor know?”

“He’s going to soon.”

* * *

The Doctor had been horrified when Dezi and the Master told them their joyous news. So horrified he had started to cry, his entire body shaking with his sobs, “Don’t hurt her,” he begged.

The two hadn’t answered him as they walked out to their waiting ship. They flew above the city, if one could even call London a city anymore, and landed on the ground. Unlike when her brother had been in the Prime Minister, there was no bustling activity at the airport. A single car, weather-weary and scratched to the extreme, sat for them. When the Master and Dezi entered the car and sat down, they were greeted with a nervous young man drumming his fingers in a nonsensical pattern.

“Mr. and Miss Saxon – I mean, Dezi and the Master,” the man greeted in a shaky, rapid voice.

Too elated to bother messing with the man, the Master gave him their wanted address and the man, without question or more rapid words, drove them to it. Dezi wondered half-heartedly if he was trying to figure out why the Master and Dezi would want to go to one of the brackets for workers, but she supposed there was an open explanation – launch day was in only a few hours and perhaps they wanted to make sure this bracket turned out more items. Or perhaps they wanted to make them an example.

The car pulled to a stop and the Master and Dezi exited it. Identical cars that had followed them pulled short and some of their armed guards walked out to flank the siblings. Spheres appeared above them, bobbing joyfully at their need to help.

The Master and Dezi were not fools, far from it. They knew that the flaps on the doors weren’t flapping because people were peering out, but because their black market guns were pointing out in case their house was chosen. On a different night, with different business, the Master might have condemned all of the houses to death, but their one purpose tonight was to get Martha Jones.

Checking his watch, the Master nodded to Dezi and the two started to walk down the street, the guards and the spheres right behind them. As they walked, the Master started to call out to the houses, “Martha. Martha Jo-hones,” he voice started to raise in pitch until it was jokingly high, “I can see you!”

He pouted exaggeratedly and turned to Dezi, motioning for her to speak, “Positions,” she called crisply. Obediently and mindlessly, the soldiers turned to one of the many houses and pointed their guns at it. Nothing happened, so Dezi held up her hand in a pause, “I’ll give the order to surrender,” she warned Martha, “I would recommend asking yourself ‘what would the Doctor do?’”

For a moment, there was nothing, but then Dezi heard a noise and she turned to face the house it came from; instead of doing the same, the Master quickly walked over so the siblings were standing side-by-side. The two stared as the door creaked open and Martha Jones stepped out and looked around, her eyes landing on them immediately.

“Oh yes!” the Master cheered and started to clap, “Oh, very well done. Wasn’t it so well done, Dezi?”

“It was the wisest decision,” Dezi agreed, “We’ll spare your accomplices for choosing it.”

Martha did not reply to Dezi or her brother. Instead, she walked into street and faced them, “Bag,” the Master ordered, “Give me the bag,” as Martha moved forwards, the Master quickly shook his head, “No, stay there. Just throw it.”

Not arguing, Martha took her bag off and threw it at them. Staring at it, Dezi took her laser screwdriver out and set the bag on fire, destroying it. Not breaking into a smile the way her brother had done, Dezi turned her screwdriver onto Martha, “Good companion, your work is done.”

The door from the house that Martha had come out of burst open and a young man with a handgun in hand ran out with a shout of “No!”

Jumping in front of Dezi, the Master shot his own laser screwdriver at the man and he fell to the ground, dead. Still in front of his sister, the Master turned to Martha and tilted his head while she glared at him, “But you…when you die, the Doctor should be witness, hm?” the Master pointed out softly. He inhaled deeply, smelling the dawn break on the horizon, “Almost dawn, Martha. And planet Earth marches to war.”


	9. The Last of the Time Lords Pt. 3: The New Life

Much later that morning, Dezi found herself in formal wear that vaguely resembled the kind she had been forced to wear on Gallifrey. It was dark red dress with golden circles as the main pattern running down it. Unlike the formal wear, though, it wasn’t floor length; this dress with to her knees, revealing dark gold flats. When she stepped out onto the bridge to face her brother, she took in his dark red suit and gold bowtie, a brother to her own outfit.

The two walked into the bridge; while Dezi sat down, her brother walked to the speaker system that would broadcast his voice to the people of Earth and to the _Valiant_ itself, “Citizens of Earth, rejoice and observe,” he commanded.

The Jones family was brought in first, all handcuffed and dirty. Then, Jack was brought in. He tried to give the people already in the conference room a bright smile, but it fell to flat for the immortal man’s usual flare. Finally, the conference room’s door slid open one final time to reveal Martha Jones with two guards escorting her. Her head was held high, something that Dezi couldn’t help but respect. It took a strong person to be able to walk to certain death without looking terrified; Dezi would make sure the woman’s death would be as quick as possible, not out of kindness, but out of respect.

The guards stayed behind, allowing Martha to make the walk from the door to the stairs that the Master and Dezi were standing on alone. Dezi watched as she took in her family, Jack, and the Doctor. For a moment, it seemed like she would break when Jack moved towards her, but she held off her emotions in favor of standing in front of the Time Lord siblings with a blank expression.

“Your teleport device. In case you thought we’d forgotten,” the Master instructed. Doing as she was told, Martha took the device out and threw it at the Master’s feat, far out of her reach unless she lunged for it, “And now…kneel,” and once again, Martha did as she was told and knelt on her knees in front of the siblings, though her head was still tilted up.

The Master sneered at her briefly but didn’t say anything. Instead, he addressed everyone in the room, “Down below, the fleet is ready to launch. Two hundred thousand ships set to burn across the universe,” he finished with a nod to Dezi.

The Time Lady stepped over to the comm. link and asked into it, “Are we ready?”

_“The fleet awaits your signal. Rejoice!”_

Smiling at the information, the Master face the crowd with new triumph, “Three minutes to align the black hole converters. Counting down!” At the command, the waiting clock started to tick down, the noise echoing through the silent room, “I never could resist a ticking clock,” the Master breathed. He tilted his head up and shouted, “My children, are you ready?”

_“We will fly and blaze and slice! We will fly and blaze and slice!”_ The chorus of replies came from the spheres floating above Earth in preparation for war.

“At zero, to mark this day, the child, Martha Jones, will die,” the Master stated. He paused and then chuckled lightly, “Ha, my first blood.”

“Any last words?” Dezi asked Martha; she wasn’t expecting a response and was not disappointed the way her brother was when the woman gave none. Martha Jones was determined to be a fighter until the end.

“Such a disappointment, this one,” the Master sneered, though Dezi could detect a bit of falsehood in his statement, even the Master could find something in Martha to respect, though it wasn’t enough to stop him from killing her, “Days of old, Doctor, you had companions who could absorb the time vortex. This one's useless!” he finished, though even there was a bit of respect to the woman as the Master hinted that Martha had done everything without aid from the time vortex. If the rumors were true, then Martha Jones had walked the Earth by herself.

“Bow your head,” Dezi commanded Martha; she was pleased when the woman did as asked and didn’t put up a fight or a struggle. The Doctor should be proud that Martha was his last companion, and Dezi intended to remind him of that.

“And so it falls to me, the Master of all, to establish from this day, a new order of Time Lords! From this day forward—” the Master cut himself off as Martha started to snicker in her kneeling position with her head still bowed, “What? What’s so funny?”

“A gun?” Martha asked, raising her head to look at the Master and Dezi as she spoke.

“What about it?” the Master asked, crossing his arms.

“A gun in four parts?”

“I destroyed it,” Dezi pointed out with a frown, “It probably wouldn’t have killed us anyways, but one can never be so sure.”

“A gun in four parts scattered across the world? I mean, come on, did you two really believe that?” Martha snorted.

Dezi felt herself freeze even as her brother asked the woman what she meant. She looked over at the Doctor, her eyes widening as he saw the Time Lord sitting there with a proud smile on his face, “As if I would ask her to kill,” he said almost tauntingly.

“Oh, well, it doesn’t matter,” the Master rushed to say, “I’ve got her exactly where I want her.”

“But I knew what Professor Docherty would do. The Resistance knew about her son,” Martha challenged, “I told her about the gun, so she’d get me here. At the right time.”

“What’s so special about killing you at this specific time and place?” Dezi asked.

Martha just smirked, “Don’t you wanna know what I was doing? Travelling the world?”

_‘Kosch, she’s baiting you,’_ Dezi warned, but her brother ignored her in favor of ordering Martha to tell him what happened, _‘Kosch please. They’ve planned something.’_

_‘It’s fine, we can kill her anytime we want. Now hush!’_

Giving her brother a short glare, Dezi listened as Martha explained how every person she met in all the places she went to, she told a story, “I told them about the Doctor,” she said, “And I told them to pass it on, to spread the word so that everyone would know about the Doctor.”

“Faith and hope? Is that all?” the Master sneered the question.

“No, ‘cause I gave them an instruction. Just as the Doctor said,” and as Martha spoke, she stood up and stared up at the Master and Dezi as if they were equals, “I told them that if everyone thinks of one word, at one specific time –“

“The archangel network,” Dezi cut in. Out of the corner of her eye she could make out her brother’s eyes widening as he came to the realization that Dezi had been right, that the Doctor and Martha had planned something and…they couldn’t kill her anymore. If they did the plan would still go on and the Doctor would be a vengeful man coming to avenge his companion.

“A telepathic field binding the whole human race together,” Martha said with a huge smile, “with all of them, every single person on Earth, thinking the same thing at the same time. And that word…is Doctor.”

As the countdown hit zero, a glowing ring appeared around the Doctor as everyone on Earth thought of him as young once more. The Master grabbed Dezi and pulled her back, blocking anyone from getting at her, “Stop it. No, no, no, no, you don't!”

But even as he protested, the prisoners around them started to say the Doctor’s name themselves. Opening her mind to speak to her brother, Dezi stumbled back as a chorus of mental _‘Doctors’_ hit her. The Master glanced behind him briefly, taking in his younger sister rubbing at her head and the unwanted tears popping into her eyes, “Close your mind!” he hissed to her, and with a tired nod she did.

Now angrier, they had hurt his _baby sister_ with their actions, he ordered as forcibly as he could, “Stop this right now! Stop it!”

No one listened, instead they continued to chant the Doctor’s name. The Master looked at the birdcage to see the light around the Doctor stretching him and slowly de-aging him from the bobble-head to an old man. Too big for the cage to hold, he broke it and started towards the siblings, “I've had a whole year to tune myself into the psychic network and integrate with its matrices.”

“I order you to stop!” the Master yelled.

The ring continued, turning the Doctor into his old, young self, “The one thing you can't do. Stop them thinking,” he said with a shake of his head. Behind him, Martha and Jack started to laugh. The Doctor give them a short smile before he levitated himself and started towards the Master and Dezi, “Tell me the human race is degenerate now when they can do this.”

“Kosch move!” Dezi snapped, shoving her brother out of the way with one hand. Her other held the laser screwdriver, and with her brother no longer blocking her, she was able to shoot at the Doctor, but he just deflected it off of him.

“I’m sorry. I’m so sorry,” the Doctor said as he took in the lines on Dezi’s forehead – her being able to hear the thoughts, no matter how hard she tried to block it out, was something he had hoped would not happen.

“Then I’ll kill them,” the Master cried out, pointing his own laser screwdriver at the Jones family, but the Doctor sent both his and hers flying across the room, leaving the Master and Dezi defenseless.

“You can't do this! You can't do—It's not fair!” the Master cried out, grabbing and squeezing Dezi’s hand hard.

“And you both know what happens now,” the Doctor pointed out as he continued to advanced towards them.

The Master shook his head hard, “No!” But even as he said that he pulled Dezi with him down the stairs, “No! No!”

“You both wouldn’t listen.”

“No!”

“Because you both know what I’m going to say.”

“No!”

And as the Master curled up next to his sister, somewhat blocking her from the Doctor, the other Time Lord stepped onto the floor, sat down next to them, and pulled the siblings into his arms, “I forgive you both,” he said softly, soothingly.

“My children!” the Master cried out.

Still holding them, the Doctor turned to call over to Jack, “Captain! The paradox machine!”

“You men! With me! You stay here!”

The Doctor distracted momentarily, Dezi was able to grab the vortex manipulator from her pocket and activate it even as the Doctor cried out, “No!” and grabbed onto it as well.

* * *

Somewhere on Earth, Dezi, the Doctor, and the Master appeared on a rocky cliff. The Master looked down at the rockets nearby and held his arms out, “Now it ends, Doctor. _Now_ it ends,” he called to the other Time Lord.

“We’ve got control of the _Valiant._ You can’t launch,” the Doctor pointed out.

“Do you think we didn’t plan for all scenarios?” Dezi asked as her brother took a small device out of his pocket and held it up for the Doctor to see, “There are black hole converters inside every Toclafane.”

“If we can’t have this world, Doctor, then neither can you. The three of us shall stand upon this Earth, together, as it burns,” the Master yelled.

The spheres were massing above them, but the three Time Lords did not pay them any mind, “Weapon after weapon after weapon,” the Doctor yelled with a shake of his head, “All you do is talk and talk and talk.  But over all these years…and all these disasters, I've always had the greatest secret of them all. I know _you,_ Master, and I know Dezi too. Explode those ships, you kill yourselves.  That's the one thing neither of you could do,” like a disappointed parent, the Doctor held out his hand, “Give that to me,” and the Master did, he slapped the converter down with a pout worthy of a child throwing a tantrum.

“You don’t know me, Doctor,” Dezi protested, the vortex manipulator still in her grasp, “I will gladly give up my life if it means that my brother _might_ have a chance of no longer hearing the drums.”

The Earth shook powerfully underneath the trio and sent them all painfully to the ground. Her hands scraped by the rocks, Dezi winced and dropped the vortex manipulator, giving the Doctor the perfect opportunity to not only grab the device but also Dezi’s and the Master’s hands and sent them back to the _Valiant._

As the trio appeared back, Dezi found herself stumbling backwards into her brother’s hands, “Grab onto something!” he warned, “The paradox is reversing.”

“Everyone down! Time is reversing!” the Doctor added from the ground.

The siblings dropped to the ground and laid there as the wind picked up around them. Dezi closed her eyes as the nauseating feeling of time reversing around them built and built and built…and then it was done. Dezi cracked open her eyes to see her brother staring at her, ashen faced.

_‘Dezi, we’re going to have to run,’_ he warned.

_‘If we get separated we should meet at the flat. That’ll give us at least an hour before people look for us.’_

Getting slowly to their feet, the Master and Dezi started to walk calmly and slowly out of the room. Their actions gathered no attention, and for once Dezi was thankful of the Doctor’s ever-running mouths as he explained to the humans what had happened and why UNIT was calling in about President Winters despite the man dying a year ago to those in the conference room.

As the Doctor greeted Clive Jones, the Master and Dezi both quickened their steps; they could feel an itching sensation growing, a sensation that was only present around…“Whoa, you two. You both don’t want to miss the party,” Jack laughed, though it was without humor, as he stopped Dezi and the Master from leaving the conference room. Holding out his hand, he curtly ordered one of their guards, “Cuffs,” and the man quickly gave two up that were promptly used on Dezi and the Master, “So, what do we do with these two?”

“We kill them,” Clive responded promptly. Even though the man lacked a weapon, he took a step towards them, looking as if he was prepared to kill them with his bare hands.

“We execute them,” Tish agreed with a particularly venomous sneer at the Master.

The Doctor quickly stepped in front of the humans and held up his hands placatingly, “No, that’s not the solution,” he chastised.

In response, Francine held up a gun and pointed it first at the Master and then at Dezi, “Oh, I think so,” she disagreed, “’Cause all those…things, they still happened because of them. I saw them.”

“You don’t have the guts,” Dezi sneered.

“Francine, you’re better than them,” the Doctor pressed, ignoring Dezi’s goading. He reached out and took Francine’s hand. Her eyes welling with tears, Francine dropped the gun and allowed the Doctor to give her a hug. When the Time Lord stepped away, she was grateful led off by her daughter.

“You still haven’t answered the question,” the Master pointed out as soon as the Doctor turned to face the siblings, “What happens to us?”

“You two are my responsibility from now on. The only Time Lords left in existence.”

Jack walked over, a heavy frown on his face, “Yeah, but you can’t trust them.”

“No,” the Doctor agreed, “The only safe place for them is the TARDIS.”

Dezi felt her brother tense beside her, “You mean you’re just gonna…keep us?”

“If that’s what I have to do,” the Doctor said with a shrug. He turned to Jack and gave the man a small smile, “It’s time to change. Maybe I’ve been wandering for too long. Now I’ll have people to take care of.”

Perhaps all would have been well and Dezi and the Master would have gone off to the TARDIS without too much of a fuss, but Dezi would never know if that would have been their future, because a gun shot rang out just after the Doctor’s words and Dezi screamed as she looked at her brother starting to slump forwards while the Doctor ran to him.

Lowering herself clumsily to the floor and with tears streaming down her face, Dezi stared down at the face of her brother in the Doctor’s arms, “Kosch,” she whispered.

“Dezi,” he replied in a weak voice that made the Time Lady’s hearts crush together, “I’m so sorry.”

“It’s fine,” Dezi tried to say with a laugh, “I don’t mind regenerating.”

“Dying in the Doctors arms,” her brother said with a chuckle that turned into a cough.

“You're not dying, don't be stupid. It's only a bullet. Just regenerate,” the Doctor said, and Dezi nodded in agreement.

Yet despite how much she wanted the Master to do what the Doctor said, she wasn’t surprised when her brother responded, “No.”

“Kosch please. Just regenerate.”

“Just regenerate! Come on!” the Doctor added hoarsely.

The Master only had eyes for his sister when he said with a small smile, “I’m so proud of what you’ve become.”

“It can’t end like this,” Dezi begged, “Don’t let me be the only one left.”

“The Doctor will take care of you,” the Master said with absolute certainty. Dezi could only watch, barely able to make out her brother’s face through her tears, as he gave her one last smile, “I love you.”

And then, the Master died. For a moment, time seemed to stand still as Dezi saw her brother’s chest cease to rise. She didn’t protest when the Doctor move one arm around her and held her close, she didn’t make a noise while the Doctor cried, and she didn’t respond when she felt the others look at them.

But she did react when the Doctor tried to lead her away. She had kicked and screamed, struggling with all her might as she was led into the TARDIS. She had begged the Doctor to let her stay with her brother’s body, to let her old the last rites as their people had done for centuries upon centuries, but the Doctor hadn’t let her. Somehow the two had ended up on the floor of the TARDIS, and while Dezi’s handcuffs were off she didn’t try to attack the Doctor when he held her and cried with her, all the while repeating that he was sorry.

That night, dressed in a long, dark red dress with black accents, Dezi and the Doctor lit the Master’s funeral pyre and watched as it burnt.

_‘Goodbye, Koschei,’_ Dezi cried out mentally as loud as she could, _‘Goodbye, brother.’_

As she broke down in tears once more, the Doctor led her back into the TARDIS. Though he had to notice that he was supporting her far more than she was supporting herself, he said nothing as he led her through the twisting hallways and to her bedroom. He looked like he wanted to say something, but all he did was make sure she was inside before he locked it and left.

Sitting down on the bed, Dezi looked down at the signet ring in her hand, it was sister to the one her brother held, the one that would have be burnt with him. Yet as she squeezed it tight, she could feel a hint of his presence; strong enough that it couldn’t be mistaken for a ghost, but weak enough that it would do nothing on its own.

As she ran her thumb over the ring, she couldn’t help but feel like the presence was promising it would bring her brother back. Even though Dezi knew that that was impossible, she couldn’t help but feel hope. Glancing around the room, Dezi walked over to the drawer next to her bed and shut the ring inside of it as she promised herself that she would never let the Doctor know about it.

And then Dezi spent her first night in the TARDIS as the Doctor’s prisoner.

* * *

The next morning, Dezi did not say goodbye to Jack with the Doctor and Martha, nor did she say goodbye when Martha left as well. Not only did she not want to be present, but the Doctor would not let her and had instead left her in her room with the door locked and the promise that he would let her out after they had left.

But as Dezi had expected, the Doctor had forgotten and she was left in her room with the door firmly closed. She sat on the bed and stared at the piece of wood, growing more and more frustrated as the minutes ticked into hours. What was the Doctor doing that was so important that he had forgotten about her? He had promised he would come and talk to her and, though Dezi hated to admit it, talking was probably the best thing for her. Just sitting on the bed allowed her thoughts to go to her brother and unwanted tears filled her eyes.

Swiping at them angrily, Dezi started to close her eyes to connect to the Doctor as her last resort, but her eyes popped open as the door to her room opened with a click. A click that was covered up by an alarm ringing through the TARDIS as the ship spun out of control.

Rising to her feet, Dezi walked out of her room and headed for the console room. She could hear the Doctor shouting at the machine, the madman, “What’s your problem?”

But then Dezi paused as she heard another man’s voice snap, “Right, just settle down now.”

Reaching the console room, she poked her head around the corner to see not one, but _two_ Doctors – the fifth and the tenth. Dezi closed her eyes and grumbled a curse under her breath. Not even 24 hours as the Doctor’s prisoner and she was going to have to stop him from blowing holes in the universe.

It was very clear, though it had always been clear to Dezi, that traveling with the Doctor was a horrible, horrible thing. She knew, without a doubt, that she was going to hate it.  

 


End file.
